and more distracted. Sir William
wandered away like some restless, hunted soul. The Colonel still sat in
his chair, nursing his last drop of _creme de menthe_ resentfully. He
did not care for the green toffee-stuff. Arthur was busy. The Major
lay sprawled in the last stages of everything on the sofa, holding
his wife's hand. And the music came pathetically through the open
folding-doors. Of course, she played with feeling--it went without
saying. Aaron's soul felt rather tired. But she had a touch of
discrimination also.

He rose and went to the drawing-room. It was a large, vacant-seeming,
Empire sort of drawing-room, with yellow silk chairs along the walls and
yellow silk panels upon the walls, and a huge, vasty crystal chandelier
hanging from a faraway-above ceiling. Lady Franks sat at a large black
Bechstein piano at one end of this vacant yellow state-room. She sat,
a little plump elderly lady in black lace, for all the world like Queen
Victoria in Max Beerbohm's drawing of Alfred Tennyson reading to her
Victorian Majesty, with space before her. Arthur's wife was bending over
some music in a remote corner of the big room.

Aaron seated himself on one of the chairs by the wall, to listen.
Certainly it was a beautiful instrument. And certainly, in her way, she
loved it. But Aaron remembered an anthem in which he had taken part as a
boy.

His eye is on the sparrow
So I know He watches me.

For a long time he had failed to catch the word _sparrow_, and had
heard:

His eye is on the spy-hole
So I know He watches me.

Which was just how it had all seemed to him, as a boy.

Now, as ever, he felt the eye was on the spy-hole. There sat the woman
playing music. But her inward eye was on the spy-hole of her vital
affairs--her domestic arrangements, her control of her household, guests
and husband included. The other eye was left for the music, don't you
know.

Sir William appeared hovering in the doorway, not at all liking the
defection of Mr. Aaron. Then he retreated. He seemed not to care for
music. The Major's wife hovered--felt it her duty to _aude_, or play
audience--and entered, seating herself in a breath of lilac and amethyst
again at the near distance. The Major, after a certain beating about the
bush, followed and sat wrapt in dim contemplation near his wife. Arthur
luckily was still busy with something.

Aaron of c