that he desired to keep the perfection of his moment
unimpaired. She understood his feeling about it, for the Sonata
Appassionata is a most glorious and moving composition, and she had
played it well.

It was true that he desired to be alone; and he took advantage of his
solitude to linger in the picture gallery. He went down the double
row of portraits that began with Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals,
and ended with Sir Frederick, the father of Lucia. He paused at each,
searching for Lucia's likeness in the likeness of those dead and gone
gentlemen and ladies; gentlemen with grave and intellectual faces,
some peevish, others proud (rather like Jewdwine), ladies with faces
joyous, dreamy, sad, voluptuous, tender and insipid, faces alike only
in their indestructible racial distinction. Lucia had taken nothing
from them but what was beautiful and fine; hers was the deep-drawn
unconscious beauty of the race; beauty of flesh and blood purified,
spiritualized in its passage through the generations, beauty that
gives the illusion of eternity, being both younger and older than the
soul. It was as if Nature had become Art in the making of Lucia,
forming her by the subtlest processes of selection and rejection.

Having gone the round of the gallery, he paused before the modern
portraits which brought him again to the door of the drawing-room. Sir
Frederick held him with his joyous satyr-face, for it was curiously,
incredibly like his daughter's (to be sure, Sir Frederick had blue
eyes and reddish hair, which made a difference). His eyebrows had a
far-off hint of her; she lingered in the tilted corners of his mouth
and eyes. And if there could be any likeness between a thing so gross
and a thing so spiritual, his upper lip took a sweep that suggested
Lucia's with its long-drawn subtle curve.

He was startled out of these reflections by the opening of the door.
Lucia stood beside him. She had a lamp in her hand which she raised
for an instant, so that the light fell full upon the portrait. Her own
face appeared as if illuminated from within by the flaming spirit of
love.

"That is my father," she said simply, and passed on.

He looked again at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished. In the
frank sensuality of Sir Frederick's crimson smirk he could find no
affinity to Lucia's grave and tender smile.

"There are some things," he said to himself, "that she could never
see."

CHAPTER XXV

If Lucia was not, as