‘Quite so. Quite so,’ returned Miss Humphrey’s father. And he spoke in the rather loud cheerful tone of one who has not heard a word of what was said to him and will resort to any subterfuge rather than have it repeated. ‘She will be delighted to see you. The music-room, I think. Delighted.’
Whether she were indeed delighted was more than the young man dared ask himself when presently, as her father had foretold, he found her in the music-room, sitting by the fire. She sat as though spiritually folded into herself, her hands resting in her lap, her glance held by the glowing logs; and something in her posture, some small quietness, some hint of a serenity at once childlike and mature, touched in her lover a chord so intimate and dear, stirred so ancient and compelling a music, that for a moment he forgot himself, his hopes and his timidity, and stood in a trance as if listening. Under this sudden assault of beauty his heart took refuge in admiration of detail: the long lashes, the russet-brown ringlets, the candid boyish mouth, the small straight nose that was somehow both proud and mischievous. Not in any one of these features, nor in their sum, lay the secret of his enthralment. These were but the outward signs of a mystery. Not his sight alone, his ear, too, was enchanted: her voice greeting him made the spell more binding. But so soon as he himself spoke, the world of habit closed in on him, and remembering his errand he felt courage ebbing away. Now surely was the time, he told himself. But no: it must be later: if I am precipitate I ruin all. If I speak now it will astonish and alarm her and she will think me a boor. And to distract himself, while he stammered his replies, he fell to praising in his mind her simple elegance and to comparing her appearance, greatly to its advantage, with that of the fine urban ladies with their vast hoops and enormous head-dresses. In her exquisite person were combined, he thought, the wholesome natural beauty of a Theocritan shepherdess and the charm of refined sensibility. Even so, with all his newly returned selfconciousness, he found courage to beg her for a song; and though at first she quietly evaded the request, at its repetition she moved without protest to the instrument, and touched the keys, and with the first warm tingling response of the plucked strings became blissfully enclosed in the world her music made. And this is her world, he thought in his rapture: this eternity, this perfection, this radiant and all-sufficing harmony of delights: this is hers, and this she is. It was a love song she sang, in her cool clear voice, and a song centuries old; but the dew was still fresh upon it, and that the sentiment was perhaps more manly than womanly made her rendering of it the more serenely impersonal: