Breathless, entranced, she stood and listened. Surely never was such a piping since King Midas of old listened to the flutes of Pan. It was truly Nature’s music, the instrument which produced it forgotten. Liquid, caressing, it rose and fell in soft cadences, yet faintly through it throbbed the undernote of pain.
How long it lasted Anne did not know. Suddenly there was a pause. Then came the nightingale’s song, one short phrase of pure rapture. [Pg 130]Then silence. Anne saw Peter standing still in the moonlight.
On a sudden impulse she moved and pulled a half-blown crimson rose from the bowl on the table near her bed. She threw it from the window and saw it fall at his feet. She saw him stoop and raise it from the ground to his lips. He looked up, and once more she saw his face.
Anne turned swiftly into the room. A moment later there was again the sound of feet on the gravel, a clear, crisp crunching which receded in the distance.
CHAPTER XIV
LE BEAU MONDE
Lady Anne Garland was sitting in Mrs. Cresswell’s drawing-room. It was a charming room, with its domed ceiling, its panelled walls, its long windows, its curtains and brocades of dull orange and glowing brown, with its porcelains, its bronzes, and its masses of yellow and white roses in old china bowls and slender glasses.
Anne herself, in a dress of some gleaming material, pale primrose in colour, was sitting on an Empire sofa. The warm brown of its brocade made a delightful harmony with the colour of her dress—in fact, she looked entirely in keeping with her surroundings. A white-haired man, with blue eyes and wearing faultless evening clothes, was sitting on the sofa beside her; and Anne was asking herself where in the name of wonder she had seen him before. Something [Pg 132]in his manner seemed familiar, or was it, perhaps, his eyes, his keen old blue eyes under their shaggy eyebrows? He had been introduced to her early in the evening, and somehow there had seemed at once a curious and indefinable sympathy between them, one which had sprung to life with the first conventional words they had uttered. Throughout the evening he had monopolized her—unquestionably monopolized her—yet entirely without appearing to do so. And over and over again Anne was asking herself when and where she had seen him before.
She glanced at him now as she slowly waved her fan—a delicate thing of mother-of-pearl and fine old cobwebby lace softly yellow with age. Anne possessed the trick of fan-waving in its subtlest form, a trick—or art—she had inherited from an ancestor of more than a century ago, one Dolores di Mendova, a very noted beauty of the Spanish court, from whom Anne had also inherited her hair, her creamy skin, and her panther-like grace.