Hans Lieder glanced at her. "This is the third of April. Fourteen years ago to-day my only child was born," he said.
"Is he dead?" Laura managed to ask.
"He is dead, through my own fault. Even Chopin could not express the despair this day brings to me. I have no right to be here, but this piano is so like my own, and I was so miserable that I rose up, and came," said this strange man. His hands on the keys wandered into more of Chopin's despairing music, and Laura did not venture to protest, though it suffocated her with a sense of misery that she could not understand.
Up-stairs little Mrs. Stewart was in despair of another sort. Again her pianist had failed her. She knew no way out of her difficulty except once more to appeal to Laura for help. She disliked to do this, knowing that the little girl was needed in the tea room. Polly eagerly offered her sister's aid, and volunteered to go down to fetch her, but Mrs. Stewart said that if she must bother her dear little neighbors she would go herself to explain matters, and so it came about that she went.
As she came lightly down the stairs the music of Herr Lieder's making came towards her. At first she heard it indistinctly, but as she proceeded it reached her ears plainly, and she stopped. Her hand pressed her side and her lips parted.
"No one else ever played like that, played THAT like that!" she murmured half aloud. With hardly a pause, as the Nocturne ended Hans Lieder had passed into the Rondo of Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique. The little dancing mistress groaned.
"Oh, I mustn't listen! It is the day that makes me imaginative. It is the Herr Lieder of whom the children have told me! But I have never been reminded of his playing before——" She shook herself together, proceeded down the few remaining stairs, and went around to the rear door that opened on the hall, entering the tea room by that way.
Her face was so ghastly white that Gretta, turning from the gas stove on which she was making tea, set down the teapot she held and sprang towards her.
"Mrs. Stewart! Are you sick?" she cried.
"No, not at all; only tired," replied Mrs. Stewart. "Gretta, are you very busy here this morning? My pianist has not come, and I wanted to beg Laura to take pity on me again. But if you can't spare her say so honestly, and I'll slip back the way I came without speaking to Margery or Hap—— Gretta, who is playing?"