the room. This was her favourite room. It expressed the best of Dane, she thought. She liked the den well enough for exotic hours, but she always felt she wanted to go out into the air afterwards, or to come to sit in the study with its satisfying balance. Everything about it seemed just right. It was a beautiful room to play in, to read in, to eat in, to talk in, or to dream in by the fire. There was only one .thing lacking in it now—the presence of the man who had made it.
As she looked in, Lee carried in the dinner tray set only for one. With a chill at her heart she went inside.
But there was a folded note on the tray. She did not see it till she had eaten her soup.
“Val, dear, play to me to-night, and please don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right in a day or two.”
Tears oozed out of her eyes and ran unheeded down her cheeks.
She sat down at the piano at eight o’clock, determined that she would play her way back into his mind. Abnormally intensified, she never played better than she did that night. As she went on the wind, which had been increasing all the evening, blew up to a gale, and moaned and whined about the chimneys and the eaves. Her mood moved with it. She played the stormiest things she knew from Tschaikovsky, Beethoven and Chopin, and when her hands dropped from the keys it was well after eleven, and the fire behind her had burned low. The room moved with shadows from the two candles which flickered in the draught that came under the doors from the open window on her side of the house.
Valerie sat still at the keyboard for a few minutes, affected by the troublous suggestion in the wind. Then she sprang to her feet electrified. She had heard her name called, called as if it had come out of a long distance, a
