"Really don't you?"
"Only drum a little sometimes, Miss Santoine. Won't you play? Please do."
She saw that they were songs which he had been examining. "Oh, you sing!"
He could not effectively deny it. She sat down at her piano and ran over the songs and selections from the new opera. He followed her with the delight of a music-lover long away from an instrument. He sang with her a couple of the songs; he had a good, unassuming tone. And as she went through the music, she noticed that he was familiar with almost everything she had liked which had been written or was current up to five years before; all later music was strange to him. To this extent he had been of her world, plainly, up to five years before; then he had gone out of it.
She realized this only as something which she was to report to her father; yet she felt a keener, more personal interest in it than that. Harriet Santoine knew enough of the world to know that few men break completely all social connections without some link of either fact or memory still holding them, and that this link most often is a woman. So now, instinctively, she found, she was selecting among the music on the racks arias of lost, disappointed or unhappy love. But she saw that Eaton's interest in these songs appeared no different from his interest in others; it was, so far as she could tell, for their music he cared for them—not because they recalled to him any personal recollection. So far as her music could assure her, then, there was—and had been—no woman in Eaton's life whose memory made poignant his break with his world.
Presently she desisted and turned to other sorts of music. Toward ten o'clock, after she had stopped playing, he excused himself and went to his rooms. She sat for a time, idly talking with Blatchford; then, as a servant passed through the hall and she mistook momentarily his footsteps for those of Avery, she got up suddenly and went upstairs. It was only after reaching her own rooms that she appreciated that the meaning of this action was that she shrank from seeing Avery again that night. But she had been in her rooms only a few minutes when her house telephone buzzed, and answering it, she found that it was Donald speaking to her.
"Will you come down for a few minutes, please, Harry?"
She withheld her answer momentarily. Before Eaton had come into her life, Donald sometimes had called her like this,—especially on those nights when he had worked late with her father,—and she had gone down to visit with him for a few minutes as an ending for the day. She had never allowed these meetings to pass beyond mere companionship; but to-night she thought of that companionship without pleasure.
"Please, Harry!" he repeated.
Some strangeness in his tone perplexed her.