ted imitation of the boardingschool girl's execution of Chopin.
He flatly refused to play anything more serious, and would practice only
in the morning, when he had the music room to himself. Hamilton and M.
Roux repaired to the smoking room to discuss the necessity of extending
the tax on manufactured articles in France--one of those conversations
which particularly exasperated Flavia.

After Schemetzkin had grimaced and tortured the keyboard with malicious
vulgarities for half an hour, Signor Donati, to put an end to his
torture, consented to sing, and Flavia and Imogen went to fetch Arthur
to play his accompaniments. Hamilton rose with an annoyed look and
placed his cigarette on the mantel. "Why yes, Flavia, I'll accompany
him, provided he sings something with a melody, Italian arias or
ballads, and provided the recital is not interminable."

"You will join us, M. Roux?"

"Thank you, but I have some letters to write," replied the novelist,
bowing.

As Flavia had remarked to Imogen, "Arthur really played accompaniments
remarkably well." To hear him recalled vividly the days of her
childhood, when he always used to spend his business vacations at her
mother's home in Maine. He had possessed for her that almost hypnotic
influence which young men sometimes exert upon little girls. It was a
sort of phantom love affair, subjective and fanciful, a precocity of
instinct, like that tender and maternal concern which some little girls
feel for their dolls. Yet this childish infatuation is capable of
all the depressions and exaltations of love itself, it has its bitter
jealousies, cruel disappointments, its exacting caprices.

Summer after summer she had awaited his coming and wept at his
departure, indifferent to the gayer young men who had called her their
sweetheart and laughed at everything she said. Although Hamilton never
said so, she had been always quite sure that he was fond of her. When
he pulled her up the river to hunt for fairy knolls shut about by low,
hanging willows, he was often silent for an hour at a time, yet she
never felt he was bored or was neglecting her. He would lie in the sand
smoking, his eyes half-closed, watching her play, and she was always
conscious that she was entertaining him. Sometimes he would take a copy
of "Alice in Wonderland" in his pocket, and no one could read it as he
could, laughing at her with his dark eyes, when anything amused him.
No one else could laugh so, with just their e