"There are new people here, Chris, but they love you as the old ones did."
He forced himself to smile at us both, to a gay response.
"As if I didn't know that to-night!"
But he did not know it. Even to me he would give no trust, because it was Jenny the girl who had been his friend and not Jenny the woman. All the inhabitants at this new tract of time were his enemies, all its circumstances his prison-bars. There was suspicion in the gesture with which, when we were back in the drawing-room he picked up the flannel from the work-table.
"Whose is this?" he said curiously. His mother had been a hard-riding woman, not apt with her needle.
"Clothes for one of the cottages," answered Kitty, breathlessly. "We—we've a lot of responsibilities, you and I. With all of the land you've bought, there are ever so many people to look after."
He moved his shoulders uneasily, as if under a yoke, and, after he had drunk his coffee, pulled up one of the blinds and went out to pace the flagged walk under the windows. Kitty huddled carelessly by the fire, her hands over her face, unheeding by its red glow she looked not so virginal and bride-like; so I think she was too distracted even to plan. I went to the piano. Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.
"So you like Jenny," said Kitty, suddenly, "to play Beethoven when it's the war that's caused all this. I could have told that you would have chosen to play German music this night of all nights."
So I began a saraband by Purcell, a jolly thing that makes one see a plump, sound woman dancing on a sanded floor in some old inn, with casks of good ale all about her and a world of sunshine and May lanes without. As I played I wondered if things like this happened when Purcell wrote such music, empty of everything except laughter and simple greeds and satisfactions and at worst the wail of unrequited love. Why had modern life brought forth these horrors, which made the old tragedies seem no more than nursery-shows? And the sky also is different. Behind Chris's head, as he halted at the open window, a search-light turned all ways in the night, like a sword brandished among the stars.
"Kitty."