Way. Then hardly knowing why she swung round and went back to the hotel.
She had not been in her room two minutes before there came a knock on her door. Michael stood there.
“Miss Carr,” he began, with his ready sentimental smile, “there’s a man in the house who would like you to play to him.” He had the manner of a person who was continuously performing deeds that had to be disguised or hidden, and he infused a perfectly innocent proceeding with an air of furtive wickedness.
“Oh, is there? Then I shall be very glad to play.” She tried to keep her voice casual.
She closed the door of the sitting-room behind her wondering if Dane were in one of the rooms next it. She knew one was Mac’s. She knew afterwards that she had played deliberately, or that she had started deliberately to get hold of the man who was listening to her. Once lost in the music she forgot him, and he existed only as a subconscious stimulus. At the end of two hours she felt herself running down. She stopped and sat still on the piano stool half expecting some sign from him. But she heard nothing, and disappointed went back to her room. Under her door she found a note in a sealed envelope. In the middle of the folded piece of paper was written, “Thanks, Miss Freedom, for a golden hour in a leaden day.”
It was one of those fragments in the development of a human relation that have a significance invisible to the casual eye. Valerie could not have torn it up or put it in the waste-paper basket. On the other hand she had not reached the exuberant stage when she wished to kiss it or put it in a scented sachet. She studied the nervous writing for a minute, and then folded it up and put it in a little tin box with a copy of her will, some receipts, some
