“Yes, they were often performed at that time. I used to hear them occasionally.”
“And you like them now. They are associated with your girlhood. I can understand that they must have a peculiar charm for you.”
“Yes, they are full of old memories.”
“Do you never play or sing yourself, aunt?”
“I play a little sometimes, when I am quite alone.”
“But never to give pleasure to other people? That seems unkind. I remember how proud my father was of your musical talent; but you would never let us hear you either at The Hook or in Parchment Street.”
“I have never cared to play or sing before an audience—since I was a girl. You need not wonder at me, Mildred. Different people have different ways of thinking. My pleasure in music of late years has been the pleasure of a listener. Mr. Castellani is good enough to gratify me sometimes, as he has done to-night, when he has nothing better to do.”
“Do not say that,” exclaimed Castellani, coming into the glow of the hearth, and seating himself beside Miss Fausset’s armchair. “What can I have better to do than to commune with a sympathetic mind like yours—in the language of the dead? It is almost as if my father’s vanished voice were speaking to you,” he said, in caressing tones, bending down to kiss the thin pale hand which lay idle on the arm of the chair.
CHAPTER V.
THE FUTURE MIGHT BE DARKER.
George Greswold was not the kind of man to sit down in idle submission to Fate under a great wrong or under a great loss. A feeling of blank despair had come upon him after his interview with Mrs. Bell, in the solitude of those deserted rooms where every object spoke to him of his wife’s absence—where the influence of her mind and fancy was a part of the very atmosphere: so much so that in spite of her farewell letter in his breast-pocket he started every now and then from his reverie, fancying he heard her footstep in the corridor, or her voice in an adjoining room.