"
There was one in the room. Olga glanced at it, and then smilingly at
her mother.
"My playing was so very primitive," said Mrs. Hannaford, with a
laugh.
"I liked it."
"Because you were a boy then."
"Let me try to be a boy again. Play something you used to. One of
those bits from 'Tell,' which take me back to the lakes and the
mountains whenever I hear them."
Mrs. Hannaford rose, laughing as if ashamed; Olga lit the candies on
the piano.
"I shall have to play from memory--and a nice mess I shall make of
it."
But memory served her for the passages of melody which Piers wished
to hear. He listened with deep pleasure, living again in the years
when everything he desired seemed a certainty of the future,
depending only on the flight of time, on his becoming "a man." He
remembered his vivid joy in the pleasures of the moment, the natural
happiness now, and for years, unknown to him. So long ago, it
seemed; yet Mrs. Hannaford, sitting at the piano, looked younger to
him than in those days. And Olga, whom as a girl of fourteen he had
not much liked, thinking her both conceited and dull, now was a very
different person to him, a woman who seemed to have only just
revealed herself, asserting a power of attraction he had never
suspected in her. He found himself trying to catch glimpses of her
face at different angles, as she sat listening abstractedly to the
music.
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