There was no change in his face disfigured by unhappiness and illness.
The air round them began to tremble with strains of music—harmonies mounting up toward a climax of intolerable beauty. It came, this perfect epitome of love, from behind the closed doors of the study, where David Verne was playing as never before.
"Lilla!"
A profound silence followed the call that neither of these two had uttered. And from behind the closed doors, David, transported by his exultation, cried out again to the Muse:
"Lilla! Lilla!"
Swaying aside, she sank down into a chair. "Oh," she breathed, looking at the rug as though some very precious object had slipped from her hands and broken at her feet. As she sat there, a huddle of coffee-colored fabric and pallid flesh, the sunlight burst through the clouds to smite her all over with its glory, igniting her hair, turning her face into incandescent gold.
Lawrence Teck watched this transformation.
He became natural—ready to fight for this woman, though still believing that he despised everything about her except her loveliness. All at once he was like a man who stands on the edge of a chasm, who has an idea that he may be able to leap across, from a bitterness endured alone to a bitterness shared with another. He took the leap. He put her to the test.
She saw him walking across the living room toward the closed doors of the study.
Noiselessly, as swift as her dreadful thought, she rose, traversed the room, passed him, and whirled round against the door. She flung out her arms in a movement that nailed her against the panels as to a cross. She could not speak; but he read on her lips, as if she had cried it in his face: