After supper Janey asked Nigel to play to her. He often used to play to her in the evenings, to relieve the aching weight of agony that gathered on her with the dusk. She lay back in the armchair, her eyes closed, wondering why Nigel's music, which she had used sometimes to hate, soothed her so inexpressibly now. She always asked him to play when she felt her heart was becoming hard—music seemed to melt down that stony sense of outrage which sometimes grew like a cancer into her thoughts. She would not, dared not, have a hard heart, and music was the only thing at present that could keep it soft.
She thought with gathering tears of the confession her brother had just made her, but she would not let her mind dwell on it—somehow she felt he would not like it. The episode did not belong to the surface of things, it belonged to the hidden life of a secret man, a holy, hopeless thing, to be guarded from the prying even of reverent thoughts. She knew that though she and Nigel might often talk together of her sorrow, they would never talk of his.
He was playing a strange tune that pattered on the silence like rain. It was the song of the man who has dreamed of love, who has wakened at last to find it only a dream, and that he lies with empty arms on a hard bed—and then suddenly realises that he has before him that which is sweeter than sleep and dreams—the joy of the day's work. He played the Prelude of the Day's Work, through which would trill the magic memory of love—love, which is so much sweeter in memory and in dream than in realisation.
At last he put aside his violin, and going over to Janey, he knelt down by her and kissed her tired face.
"Oh, Nigel ... Nigel!"
"You'll come with me to London, and help me in my new life?"
"I want a new life too."
"We'll start one together."
"And—and you'll play the devil out of me when he comes?"