She held out her hand.
“It is very charming of you to come and see me, Mr. Treherne,” she said. “Pietro, the lights.”
Paul heard the sound of three or four tiny clickings near the door, and the room became full of a soft mellow light. Had the light been a trifle brighter, or her voice a shade less natural, the whole thing might have verged on the theatrical. As it was, it was simply a revelation to Paul as, for the first time, he saw the Duchessa di Corleone.
She stood before him smiling—a smile that just lit up her eyes and trembled on her mouth. He saw that her skin was smooth like ivory, that her lips were crimson like wine beneath oiled silk, that her hair was the colour of a chestnut newly wrested from its sheath.
All this Paul saw almost without realizing it. For suddenly his heart heard a tune—one that is played silently throughout the ages, and to most of us the hearing of the tune comes slowly and gradually, a note at a time. But to a few—as to Paul—it comes suddenly, played in full melody. He felt vaguely that he had been waiting for that tune all his life, listening for it on the plains, in the silence of the night under the stars.
But he merely bowed and said in the most ordinary and conventional voice in the world:
“It was very good of you to ask me to come and see you.”
For Paul did not yet know the meaning of the tune. In his lonely life he had never before even heard an imitation of it. And because the music was very strange and very beautiful he listened to it with something like awe.
And then he heard Christopher’s voice.
“I ought to have told you, Sara, that Mr. Treherne is an artist of strange moods, and that sometimes he refuses—in the most polite and diplomatic way, of course—to accept commissions.”