I glanced at Katherine, and wanted to say something pleasant to her, but that was apparently beyond my power. My solitary “No,” in answer to her question about golf, had been the one word I had so far addressed to her. I relapsed into silence and did not speak again till dinner was over. When we went to the drawing-room it looked as if we were going to have a musical evening, for Miss Dick sat down at the piano with all the air of a person opening a concert. She played an arrangement of something or other, by Thalberg. All Miss Dick’s pieces were arrangements, except those that were fantasias, and it was a feature of them that the beginning of the end could be heard about a couple of pages off, in a series of frantic rushes and arpeggios. She played now with a fierce concentration on the task to be accomplished; her face getting redder as Thalberg became more surprising; her mouth screwed up slightly at the right corner, through which just the tip of her tongue was visible; her eyes glaring, devouring the sheet of music before her, at which every now and then she made a frantic grab with her left hand, to turn the page――she would never allow anybody to turn for her. When she had struck the last note, to which she indeed gave an astonishing rap, there was a general sigh, as for a danger evaded. “My dear, I don’t know how you do it!” Mrs. Carroll murmured, almost as breathless as the performer. “It does take it out of one,” Miss Dick panted complacently. Gerald sat looking on with a barely perceptible smile. “Won’t you play something now?” Miss Dick said to him. His eyebrows twitched slightly. “Not just yet, I think. In a little. I want to smoke a cigarette first.” He passed out on to the terrace, and we all gazed after him. When he thought, I suppose, that the echoes awakened by Miss Dick had had time to subside, he came back, and began to fiddle with the music-stool, screwing it up and down. Yet when he did commence to play, after many preliminaries, it was in a broken fragmentary fashion, beginning things and suddenly dropping them after a few bars. I was prepared not to like him, but he had not struck more than a note or two when I knew I had never heard the piano really played before. In spite of myself I felt the dislike I had conceived for him slipping away, and then, just as I was commencing to enjoy myself, he stopped abruptly. He got up and walked over to the window where I sat. “You haven’t altered, Gerald,” said Mrs. Carroll dryly. “Do you mean my playing, Aunt?” he asked sweetly. “It is supposed to have got rather better, but I am sure you are right.”