her
neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which
made all the other hues of the room pale and vague. A fillet of faint,
sky-like blue drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her
temples, and from this there rose the gleam of jewels. Her head inclined
gently, gravely, toward him--with the posture of that armless woman in
marble he had been studying--and her brown eyes, regarding him from the
shadows, emitted light.

"It is a lullaby--the only one he wrote," she said, as Theron,
pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her. "No--you mustn't
stand there," she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument;
"go back and sit where you were."

The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing
rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on
something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once
more, passed, so to speak, over Theron's head. He leaned back upon the
cushions, and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds
of this strange, statue-like drapery made bare.

There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade. It
seemed to him that there were words going along with it--incoherent and
impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument
and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained
after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come
a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into
a mockery of inconsequence.

Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a
soft-throated woman singing to her lover.

"It is like Heine--simply a love-poem," said the girl, over her
shoulder.

Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth
Nocturne onward. The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth,
was in truth a lover's quarrel; and then the mild, placid flow of sweet
harmonies into which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a
silence all alive with tender memories of sound--was that not also a
part of love?

They sat motionless through a minute--the man on the divan, the girl
at the piano--and Theron listened for what he felt must be the audible
thumping of his heart.

Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she
had withheld for the last--the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign
thing she played with her eyes closed, her head ti