This memory of her first impressions about him was so strong with her that she could not help speaking of it one evening after dinner when she had been playing one of Beethoven’s grandest adagios to him, and they were sitting in silence, she by the piano, he far away by an open window on a level with the shadowy lawn, where the great cedars rose black against the pale gray sky.
“George, do you remember my playing that adagio to you for the first time?”
“I remember you better than Beethoven. I could scarcely think of the music in those days for thinking so much of you.”
“Ah, but the first time you heard me play that adagio was before you had begun to care for me—before you had cast your slough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before you had come out of your cloud of sad memories. When first you came to us you lived only in the past. I doubt if you were more than half-conscious of our existence.”
She could only distinguish his profile faintly defined against the evening gray as he sat beside the window. Had she seen the expression of his face, its look of infinite pain, she would hardly have pursued the subject.
“I had but lately lost my mother,” he said gravely.
“Ah, but that was a grief which you did not hide from us. You did not shrink from our sympathy there. There was some other trouble, something that belonged to a remoter past, over which you brooded in secret. Yes, George, I know you had some secrets then—that divided us—and—and—” falteringly, with tears in her voice—“I think those old secrets are keeping us asunder now, when our grief should draw us nearer together.”
She had left her place by the piano, and had gone to him as she spoke, and now she was on her knees beside him, clinging to him tearfully.