She bent toward the window, holding her hollowed hand to her ear. My Lord Gore pulled down his ruffles and leaned gracefully against the wainscoting. He winced hypersensitively as the harpsichord notes jangled out of tune. “Well, madam, if you can make anything out of it—” “Be still.” “For five minutes I will have no tongue.” There was an expression of bleak intentness upon Anne Purcell’s face. More than once her lips moved. My lord watched her with an air of cynical tolerance. Suddenly she straightened at the hips and swung the lattice to with a clash of impatience. “Tut—tut!” quoth the gentleman, soothingly. “Did you hear what the girl is thumbing out?” “No, on my honor.” “That song of Sutcliffe’s which the Westminster choir-master set to music! Such things must run in the girl’s brain.” A frown gathered upon my lord’s debonair and buxom face. “You are always looking for the snake under the stone, Nan. Why should we worry over such a flick of the memory?” “Why? Why, indeed! Except that some shadow seems always to strike across my face. You—you should understand.” He drew a deep breath, and expelled it slowly with a hissing sound between his closed teeth. “If you believe in omens, Nan, we must transfer the sinister side of it to Captain Jack. Pah! what do either of the young fools know? They will help each other to forget every one and everything on earth save their two sweet selves. That is one of the advantages of the disease. What are parents when a lover appears? He has already roused the girl to some show of spirits, and for that, Nan, you should be thankful.” There was, however, something false and forced in the energy of his cynicism, and in the flippant way he tossed the past aside. Yet even when they returned to the salon on the other side of the house, the faint, husky voice of the harpsichord followed them like a voice from another world. XVI In the music-room a sudden silence had fallen, like the pause between the two stanzas of a song. Barbara, seated on an oak settle with a cushion of crimson velvet, let her hands rest idly on the key-board of the harpsichord. Her eyes were raised as though her thoughts had been carried beyond the four walls of the room by the music her fingers had drawn from the keys. Yet it was not the pose of one who was dreaming, for she was looking into a mirror that hung on the wall above the harpsichord. In that mirror—she had hung it there with her own hands—she could see the greater part of the room reflected with all the minute brilliance of a Dutch “interior”: the polished floor, the oak table, John Gore’s red coat, the brown wainscoting; even the vivid grass beyond the window, and the massed colors of a bed of summer flowers. John Gore was sitting in the window-seat, and she could watch his face in the mirror on the wall.