“I am glad of that,” she cried simply, then in a quick conscious tone explained, “I mean that the hearing of such music makes an era in our life, a starting-point for thoughts that reach away into eternity; we could not bear such experiences often, it would confuse the spirit if not deaden its enjoyment. Or so it seems to me,” she added naively, glancing at her cousin who now came sweeping in from the further room, where she had been trying the effect of a change in the arrangement of two little pet monstrosities of Japanese ware.
“What seems to you?” that lady inquired. “O, Mr. Mandeville’s playing? I beg pardon, Sylvester is the name by which you now wish to be addressed I suppose. Fine, isn’t it?” she rambled on all in the same tone while she cautiously hid an unfortunate gape of her rosy mouth behind the folds of her airy handkerchief. “ Mr. Turner says the hiatus you have made in the musical world by leaving the concert room for the desk, can never be repaired,” she went on, supposedly to her nephew though she did not look his way, being at that instant engaged in sinking into her favorite chair.
“I am glad,” Bertram politely returned with a frank smile, “to have enjoyed the approval of so cultivated a critic as Mr. Turner. I own it occasions me a pang now and then,” he remarked to his uncle over his shoulder, “to think I shall never again call up those looks of self-forgetful delight, which I have sometimes detected on the faces of certain ones in my audience.”
And he relapsed without pause into a solemn anthem, the very reverse of the stirring tones which he had previously accorded them.
“Now we are in a temple!” whispered Paula, subduing the sudden interest and curiosity which this young man’s last words had awakened. And the awe which crept over her countenance was the fittest interpretation to those noble sounds, which the one weary-hearted man in that room could have found.