found the spectacle really
touching.

Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more toward the
piano. Thorpe was not stirred at all by the music, but the spirit of
it as it was reflected upon this beautiful facial outline--sensitive,
high-spirited, somewhat sad withal--appealed to something in him. He
moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen restricted paces,
and halted again at the corner of a table. It was a relief that the
Honourable Balder, though he followed along, respected now his obvious
wish for silence. But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that
the music said less than nothing to his ears--that it was the face that
had beckoned him to advance.

Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him, he studied
this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall
beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the
thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and
chin. It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he
could not be sure.

So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had lived! He said
to himself that he had never seen before, or imagined, a face which
belonged so indubitably beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in
diamonds. The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy, of
the great lady--they were all there in their supreme expression. And
yet--why, she was no great lady at all. She was the daughter of his
old General Kervick--the necessitous and haughtily-humble old military
gentleman, with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat, who did
what he was told on the Board without a question, for a pitiful three
hundred a year. Yes--she was his daughter, and she also was poor.
Plowden had said so.

Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving her from her
father's importunities? He must have had it very much at heart, to
have invented the roundabout plan of getting the old gentleman a
directorship. But no--there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even
forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. It would have
been his sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady
Cressage, who gave him the hint to help the General to something if he
could. And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
military men and so on, had no other notion of making money save by
directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it. Plowden had remembered
Kervic