Instinct warned him that she was only a child, interested in the merely mechanical tricks of how things were done; that she wanted to see the working of the stops and pedals more than to hear the music; that this impulse of hers did not betoken any particular friendliness for him or admiration for his playing. Yet some secondary instinct, some quick passionate enthusiasm, swept away the calculating logic of that, and made him a prey to the wildest and raptest of anticipations. In the vestry she blushed violently as he met her; she seemed more a child than ever before. And she scampered up the steep ladder into the loft with an agility that bewildered him. He never dreamt that she could so put away all fear and embarrassment of his presence; as she clambered up on to the end of the bench beside him (for there was no seating-room anywhere else) he wondered if this were merely a mood of hers, or if some real and deep change had come over her since their last meeting. She was so delicately lovely; to see her there, with her eyes upon him, so few inches from his, gave him a curious electrical pricking of the skin. Sometimes, he noticed, her eyes watched his hands steadily; sometimes, with a look half-bold, half-timid, they travelled for an instant to his face. He even wondered, with an egotism that made him smile inwardly, if she were thinking him good-looking. "Now," he said, beginning to pull out the necessary stops, "what shall we have?--'The Moonlight Sonata,' eh?" "Yes," she assented, eagerly. "I've heard Clare talk about it." He played it to her; then he played her a medley of Bach, Dvorak, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Lemare. He was surprised and pleased to discover that, on the whole, she preferred the good music to the not so good, although, of course, her musical taste was completely unsophisticated. Mainly, too, it was the music that kept her attention, though she had a considerable childish interest in his manual dexterity and in the mechanical arrangement of the stops and couplings. She said once, in a pause between two pieces: "Aren't they strange hands?" He replied, laughing away his embarrassment: "I don't know. Are they?" After he had played, rather badly but with great verve, the _Ruy Blas_ Overture of Mendelssohn, she exclaimed: "Oh, I wish I could play like that!" He said: "But you do play the piano, don't you? And I prefer the piano to the organ: it's less mechanical." She clapped her hands together in a captivatingly childish gesture of excitement and said: "Oh yes, the piano's lovely, isn't it? But I can't play well--oh, I wish I could!" "You could if you practised hard enough," he answered, with prosaic encouragement. "I can hear you sometimes, you know, when I'm in my room at nights and the window's open. I think you could become quite a good player."