“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what I am,” she murmured half to herself.
“Whoever you are it’s the same to me, Dulcie.” ... He took a few short, nervous turns across the room; walked slowly back to her: “Has it come back to you yet—that song of your mother’s you were trying to remember?”
Even while he was speaking the song came back to her memory—her mother’s song called “Asthore”—startling her with its poignant significance to herself.
“Do you recollect it?” he asked again.
“Y-yes ... I can’t sing it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t wish to sing ‘Asthore’——” She bent her head and gazed at the keyboard, the painful colour dyeing her neck and cheeks.
When at length she looked up at him out of lovely, distressed eyes, something in his face—something—some new expression which she dared not interpret—set her heart flying. And, scarcely knowing what she was saying in her swift and exquisite confusion: