"I wonder what little pleasure—or perhaps necessity—you have denied yourself to perform that act of kindness?" he said. "Neither the one nor the other, _lieber Junge_. If I deny myself one pleasure to give myself another, it can hardly be counted as a denial, can it? Besides, I believe her people are very badly off, and it is a shame that her talent should suffer for it. There! I am sure you want to go upstairs. Run along, and let me write my letters." Wolff laughed at the old command, which dated back to the time when he had worried her with his boy’s escapades. "I’ll just glance in and tell Hildegarde my good luck," he said, a little awkwardly. "I promised her I would let her know as soon as the news came." "Do, dear Wolff." She turned back to her letters, and Arnim, taking advantage of her permission, hurried out of the room and upstairs. Hildegarde’s little boudoir was an inner room, divided off from the neighbouring apartment by a heavy Liberty curtain. Governed by he knew not what instinct or desire, he stepped softly across and, drawing the hangings a little on one side, remained a quiet, unobserved spectator of the peaceful scene. Nora had left the _Walküre_ and had plunged into the first act of _Tristan und Isolde_. She played it with inexperience and after her own ideas, which were perhaps not the most correct, but the face alone, with its youth, its eagerness, its enthusiasm, must have disarmed the most captious critic. And Wolff von Arnim was by no means captious at that moment. Though he was listening, he hardly realised what she was playing, too absorbed in the pure pleasure which the whole picture gave him to think of details. He knew, for instance, that her dress was simple and pretty, but he could not tell afterwards whether it was blue or green or pink, or of no colour at all; he knew that he had never before found so much charm in a woman’s face, but he would have been hard put to to describe exactly wherein that charm lay, or whether her features were regular or otherwise. He simply received an impression—one that he found difficult to forget. A lamp had been placed on the top of the piano, and by its light the bright, wide-open eyes and eager fingers were finding their way through the difficult score. The rest of the room had been left in shadow. Arnim knew where his cousin was lying, but he did not look in her direction—perhaps he did not even think of her, so far did she lie outside the picture on which his whole interest was centred; and when the music died into silence, her voice startled him by its very unexpectedness. "Wolff, won’t you come in now?" she said.