The pretty face was full of dreamy tenderness, the eyes lit up witchingly. She pulled herself up suddenly, and stole a shy glance at her auditor.
'Yes, yes, go on,' he said; 'tell me all you feel about the music.'
'And there's one song you sometimes play that makes me feel floating on and on like a great white swan.'
She hummed a few bars of the
'Dear me! you have an ear!' he said, pinching it. 'And how did you like what I was playing just now?' he went on, growing curious to know how his own improvisations struck her.
'Oh, I liked it so much,' she whispered enthusiastically, 'because it reminded me of my favourite one-every moment I did think-I thought-you were going to come into that.'
The whimsical sparkle leapt into his eyes.
'And I thought I was so original,' he murmured.
'But what I liked best,' she began, then checked herself, as if suddenly remembering she had never made a spontaneous remark before, and lacking courage to establish a precedent.
'Yes-what you liked best?' he said encouragingly.
'That song you sang this afternoon,' she said shyly.
'What song? I sang no song,' he said, puzzled for a moment.
'Oh yes! That one about-
'Kiss me, dear love, good-night.'
I was going upstairs, but it made me stop just here-and cry.'
He made his comic grimace.
'So it was you Beethoven was barking at! And I thought he had an ear! And I thought you had an ear! But no! You're both Philistines, after all. Heigho!'
She looked sad. 'Oughtn't I to ha' liked it?' she asked anxiously.
'Oh yes,' he said reassuringly, 'it's very popular. No drawing-room is without it.'
She detected the ironic ring in his voice. 'It wasn't so much the music,' she began apologetically.
'Now-now you're going to spoil yourself,' he said. 'Be natural.'
'But it wasn't,' she protested. 'It was the words--'
'That's worse,' he murmured below his breath.
'They reminded me of my mother as she laid dying.'
'Ah!' said Lancelot.
'Yes, sir, mother was a long time dying-it was when I was a little girl, and I used to nurse her-I fancy it was our little Sally's death that killed her; she took to her bed after the funeral, and never left it till she went to her own,' said Mary Ann, with unconscious flippancy. 'She used to look up to the ceiling and say that she was going to little Sally, and I remember I was such a silly then, I brought mother flowers and apples and bits of cake to take to Sally with my love. I put them on her pillow, but the flowers faded and the cake got mouldy-mother was such a long time dying-and at last I ate the apples myself, I was so tired of waiting. Wasn't I silly?' And Mary Ann laughed a little laugh with tears in it. Then growing grave again, she added: 'And at last, when mother was really on the point of death, she forgot all about little Sally, and said she was going to meet Tom. And I remember thinking she was going to America. I didn't know people talk nonsense before they die.'
'They do-a great deal of it, unfortunately,' said Lancelot lightly, trying to disguise from himself that his eyes were moist. He seemed to realise now what she was-a child; a child who, simpler than most children to start with, had grown only in body, whose soul had been stunted by uncounted years of dull and monotonous drudgery. The blood burnt in his veins as he thought of the cruelty of circumstance and the heartless honesty of her mistress. He made up his mind for the second time to give Mrs. Leadbatter a piece of his mind in the morning.
'Well, go to bed now, my poor child,' he said, 'or you'll get no rest at all.'
'Yessir.'
She went obediently up a couple of stairs, then turned her head appealingly towards him. The tears still glimmered on her eyelashes. For an instant he thought she was expecting her kiss, but she only wanted to explain anxiously once again, 'That was why I liked that song, 'Kiss me, good-night, dear love.' It was what my mother--'
'Yes, yes, I understand,' he broke in, half amused, though somehow the words did not seem so full of maudlin pathos to him now. 'And there--'-he drew her head towards him-'Kiss
He did not complete the quotation; indeed, her lips were already drawn too close to his. But, ere he released her, the long-repressed thought had found expression.
'You don't kiss anybody but me?' he said half playfully.
'Oh no, sir,' said Mary Ann earnestly.
'What!' more lightly still. 'Haven't you got half a dozen young men?'
Mary Ann shook her head, more regretfully than resentfully. 'I told you I never go out-except for little errands.'
She had told him, but his attention had been so concentrated on the ungrammatical form in which she had conveyed the information, that the fact itself had made no impression. Now his anger against Mrs. Leadbatter dwindled. After all, she was wise in not giving Mary Ann the run of the London streets.
'But'-he hesitated. 'How about the-the milkman-and the-the other gentlemen.'
'Please, sir,' said Mary Ann, 'I don't like them.'
After that no man could help expressing his sense of her good taste.
'Then you won't kiss anybody but me,' he said, as he let her go for the last time. He had a Quixotic sub- consciousness that he was saving her from his kind by making her promise formally.
'How could I, Mr. Lancelot?' And the brimming eyes shone with soft light. 'I never shall-never.'
It sounded like a troth.
He went back to the room and shut the door, but could not shut out her image. The picture she had unwittingly supplied of herself took possession of his imagination: he saw her almost as a dream-figure-the virginal figure he knew-standing by the stream in the sunset, amid the elms and silver birches, with daisies in her hands and bluebells at her feet, inhaling the delicate scent that wafted from the white hawthorn bushes, and watching the water glide along till it seemed gradually to wash away the fading colours of the sunset that glorified it. And as he dwelt on the vision he felt harmonies and phrases stirring and singing in his brain, like a choir of awakened birds. Quickly he seized paper and wrote down the theme that flowed out at the point of his pen-a reverie full of the haunting magic of quiet waters and woodland sunsets and the gracious innocence of maidenhood. When it was done he felt he must give it a distinctive name. He cast about for one, pondering and rejecting titles innumerable. Countless lines of poetry ran through his head, from which he sought to pick a word or two as one plucks a violet from a posy. At last a half-tender, half-whimsical look came into his face, and picking his pen out of his hair, he wrote merely-'Marianne.'
It was only natural that Mary Ann should be unable to maintain herself-or be maintained-at this idyllic level. But her fall was aggravated by two circumstances, neither of which had any particular business to occur. The first was an intimation from the misogamist German Professor that he had persuaded another of his old pupils to include a prize symphony by Lancelot in the programme of a Crystal Palace Concert. This was of itself sufficient to turn Lancelot's head away from all but thoughts of Fame, even if Mary Ann had not been luckless enough to be again discovered cleaning the steps-and without gloves. Against such a spectacle the veriest idealist is powerless. If Mary Ann did not immediately revert to the category of quadrupeds in which she had started, it was only because of Lancelot's supplementary knowledge of the creature. But as he passed her by, solicitous as before not to tread upon her, he felt as if all the cold water in her pail were pouring down the back of his neck.
Nevertheless, the effect of both these turns of fortune was transient. The symphony was duly performed, and dismissed in the papers as promising, if over-ambitious; the only tangible result was a suggestion from the popular composer, who was a member of his club, that Lancelot should collaborate with him in a comic opera, for the production of which he had facilities. The composer confessed he had a fluent gift of tune, but had no liking for the drudgery of orchestration, and as Lancelot was well up in these tedious technicalities, the two might strike a partnership to mutual advantage.
Lancelot felt insulted, but retained enough mastery of himself to reply that he would think it over. As he gave
