A few minutes later the two singers' voices were blending delightfully together, while Nan's slight, musician's fingers threaded their way through intricacies of the involved accompaniment.
She was a wonderful accompanist—rarest of gifts—and when, at the end of the song, the restrained, well-bred applause broke out, Peter Mallory's share of it was offered as much to the accompanist as to the singers themselves.
"Stay where you are, Nan," cried Kitty, as the girl half rose from the music-seat. "Stay where you are and play us something."
Knowing Nan's odd liking for a dim light, she switched off most of the burners as she spoke, leaving only one or two heavily shaded lights still glowing. Mallory crossed the room so that, as he stood leaning with one elbow on the chimney-piece, he faced the player, on whose aureole of dusky hair one of the lights still burning cast a glimmer. While he waited for her to begin, he was aware of a little unaccustomed thrill of excitement, as though he were on the verge of some discovery.
Hesitatingly Nan touched a chord or two. Then without further preamble she broke into the strange, suggestive music which Penelope had described as representing the murder of a soul. It opened joyously, the calm beginnings of a happy spirit; then came a note of warning, the first low muttering of impending woe. Gradually the simple melody began to lose itself in a chaos of calamity, bent and swayed by wailing minor cadences through whose torrent of hurrying sound it could be heard vainly and fitfully trying to assert itself again, only to be at last weighed down, crushed out, by a cataclysm of despairing chords. Then, after a long, pregnant pause—the culminating silence of defeat—the original melody stole out once more, repeated in a minor key, hollow and denuded.
As the music ceased the lights sprang up again and Nan, looking across the room, met Mallory's gaze intently bent upon her. In his expression she could discern that by a queer gift of intuition he had comprehended the whole inner meaning of what she had been playing. Most people would have thought that it was a magnificent bit of composition, particularly for so young a musician, but Mallory went deeper and knew it to be a wonderful piece of self-revelation—the fruit of a spirit sorely buffeted.
Almost instantaneously Nan realised that he had understood, and she was conscious of a fierce resentment. She felt as though an unwarrantable intrusion had been made upon her privacy, and her annoyance showed itself in the quick compression of her mouth. She was about to slip away under cover of the applause when Mallory laid a detaining hand upon her arm.
"Don't go," he said. "And forgive me for understanding!"
Nan, sorely against her will, looked, up and met his eyes—eyes that were irresistibly kind and friendly. She hesitated, still anxious to escape.
"Please," he begged. "Don't leave me"—his lips endeavouring not to smile—"in high dudgeon. It's always seemed such an awful thing to be left in—like boiling oil."