“No, no,” Mrs. Batty answered hastily. “He’s so particular. Why, if I asked you to have another cup of tea, he’d shut the piano, and that makes things very uncomfortable indeed. You can imagine. And John has this new dog—really I don’t think it’s right on a Sunday. It’s all dogs and cricket with him. Well, cricket’s better than football, for really, on a Saturday in the winter I never know whether I shall see him dead or alive. I do wish I’d had a girl.” She took Henrietta’s hand. “And you, poor dear child, without a mother—what was it she died of, my dear? Ah you’ll miss her, you’ll miss her! My own dear mother died the day after I was married, and I said to Mr. Batty, ‘This can bode no good.’ We had to come straight back from Bournemouth, where we’d gone For our honeymoon, and by the time I was out of black my trousseau was out of fashion. I must say Mr. Batty was very good about it. It was her heart, what with excitement and all that. She was a stout woman. All my side runs to stoutness, but Mr. Batty’s family are like hop-poles. Well, I believe it’s healthier, and I must say the boys take after him. Now I fancy you’re rather like Miss Rose.” “They say I am just like my father.” Mrs. Batty said “Ah!” with meaning, and Henrietta tried to sit straighter on the seductive settee. She could not allow Mrs. Batty to utter insinuating ejaculations and, raising her voice, she said: “Mr. Batty, do play something.” Charles Batty gazed at her over the shining surface of the grand piano and looked remarkably like an owl, an owl that had lost its feathers. “Something? What?” “Charles!” exclaimed Mrs. Batty. “Oh, I don’t know,” Henrietta murmured. She could think of nothing but a pictorial piece of music her mother had sometimes played on the lodging-house piano, with the growling of thunder-storms, the twittering of birds after rain and a suggestion of church bells, but she was determined not to betray herself. “Whatever you like.” He broke into a popular waltz, playing it derisively, yet with passion, so that Mrs. Batty’s ponderous head began to sway and Henrietta’s feet to tap. He played as though his heart were in the dance, and to Henrietta there came delightful visions, thrilling sensations, unaccountable yearnings. It was like the music she had heard at the theatre, but more beautiful. Her eyes widened, but she kept them lowered, her mouth softened and she caught her lip. “Now I call that lovely,” Mrs. Batty said, with the last chord. His look questioned Henrietta and she, cautious, simply smiled at him, with a tilt of the lips, a little raising of the eyebrows, meant to assure him that she felt as he did. “If you’d play a pretty tune like that now and then, people would be glad to listen,” Mrs. Batty went on. “I’m sure I quite enjoyed it.”