"Exclusively with your mother?"
"Yes; she even gave me lessons in French and upon the piano."
She was burning to rehabilitate her mother in his eyes.
"My wife was an admirable performer, an artist, a pupil of Liszt's," Strachinsky interposed.--"Play something to the Doctor; be quick!" he ordered, grandiloquently, dropping again his rôle of tender parent. His imperious tone provoked Erika unutterably: she would have liked to rush from the room and fling to the door behind her, but she conquered herself for her mother's sake and--out of vanity.
She opened the piano, and played the last portion of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata,--the last thing that she had studied with her mother. Her execution was still rude and unequal, like that of an ardent youthful creature whose musical aspirations have never been toned down by culture, but an unusual amount of talent was evident in her performance.
"Magnificent, Countess!" exclaimed the lawyer, rising and going towards her as she left the piano.
"Very well; but you missed that last chord once," Strachinsky said, pompously.
Doctor Herbegg paid him not the least attention. "Now I am forced to go," he said to the young girl; "and you must not smile, Countess, if I tell you that I leave you with a much lighter heart than the one I brought with me. Your grandmother sent me here to reconnoitre, as it were: I find a gifted young lady, where I had feared to encounter an untrained village girl."
Then suddenly Erika's overstrained nerves gave way. "My grandmother had no right to allow of such a fear on your part; no one who had ever known my mother could have supposed anything of the kind."
He looked her full in the face more steadily, more searchingly than before, and his cold, clear eyes suddenly shone with a genial light. "Forgive me," he said, kissing the hand she held out to him; then, turning, he would have left the room with a brief bow to Strachinsky.