Catherine flushed Her hands commenced to play, but her whole being was tingling with anger. She was conscious that everybody in the room had noticed his ostentatious withdrawal and was drawing conclusions from it. Everybody knew she took lessons from him. His going out of the room at that moment was nothing less than a deliberate insult offered to her in front of everybody. In the half-shadows round the piano she could see the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Trant, both rather bewildered.... Her fingers were moving automatically; before she properly realized she was playing a solo they had stopped. Cloudily she grasped the fact that the “Butterfly” Study had come to an end. Applause floated in, and she found herself walking back to her seat. Applause thinned and subsided; Mrs. Trant said something, and there began the tuning of a couple of violins with much unnecessary prodding of notes on the piano. George was saying something to her, but she was not listening. The door opened and Verreker re-entered. He sat down unostentatiously in a chair close by and his face was hidden by shadows. The piano tinkled into the opening of a Haydn Concerto.... And Catherine thought: “That was really a _horrid_ thing to do. I believe it is the nastiest trick I ever saw. I expected rudeness, but somehow not _that_--at any rate, not in public.” She was primarily angry, but in her anger there was more than a tinge of disappointment.... She hated him. The fact that it was his teaching that had brought her success was swamped utterly in this petty insult he had seen fit to offer her in public. Once the idea did strike her: perhaps it was just coincidence that he went out while I was playing. But instinct told her that his withdrawal was deliberate, part of a planned scheme to humiliate her. And she kept piercing the shadows where he sat with a venomous greenish glint in her eyes, until she reflected that even if she could not see him, he could very likely see her. At this she flushed hotly and turned away. The evening crept towards midnight. Coffee was handed round. There was a momentary respite from music after the conclusion of the Hadyn Concerto, and conversation swelled into a murmurous hum all over the room. She lit a cigarette and puffed out smoke languidly. George went to the music cabinet and brought out some Ravel music. She scanned it perfunctorily; as a matter of fact she had but a vague idea of what it was like by looking at it. “Pavane pour un Enfant Défunt,” it was called; the first few pages looked charmingly simple. George could not find “Jeux d’Eaux.” Possibly he had not got a copy. But all this modern music was frightfully interesting. Had she heard César Franck’s Violin Sonata--the famous one? Or Scriabin’s Eleven Preludes? Or Debussy’s “L’Après-midi d’une Faune”? Of course, futurist music was merely the development of what other composers had led the way to. Some of Chopin’s Ballades and Preludes, for instance,