“Oh, Aunt Angela, did the flute wake you?” she asked.

For answer the long white figure stopped its frantic movement and turned upon her a blanched and stricken face out of which two beautiful haunted eyes stared like living terrors—­terrors of memory, of silence, of the unseen which had taken visible forms.

“Stop it!  Stop it!  Stop it!” cried Angela breathlessly, raising her quivering hands to her ears.  “I have heard it before!  I have heard it—­long before!”

She paused, gasping, and without a word Laura turned and ran down the dark staircase, while with each step the air that Uncle Percival played sounded louder in her ears.

The door of the library was open, and as she entered she called out in a voice that held a sob of anger, “Uncle Percival, how could you?”

His attentive, deafened ears were for his music alone, and, letting the flute fall from his hands, he turned to look at her with the pathetic, innocent enquiry of a good but uncomprehending child.  At the sight of his smiling, wrinkled face, his gentle blue eyes and the wistful droop of disappointment at the corners of his mouth, her indignation changed suddenly to pity.  It seemed to her that she saw all his eighty years looking at her from that furrowed face out of those little wandering round blue eyes—­saw the human part of him as she had never seen it before—­with its patience of unfulfilment, its scant small pleasures, its innocent senile passion at the end; saw, too, the divine part, hidden in him as in all humanity—­that communion of longing which bound his passionate fluting, Angela’s passionate remorse and her own passionate purity into the universal congregation of unsatisfied souls.

The sharp words died upon her lips and, kneeling at his side, she took his shrivelled little hands into her warm, comforting clasp.  “Dear Uncle Percival, I understand, and I love you,” she said.

CHAPTER IV

USHERS IN THE MODERN SPIRIT

“So you have seen her,” Adams had remarked the same afternoon, as he walked with Trent in the direction of Broadway.  “Do you walk up, by the way?  I always manage to get in a bit of exercise at this hour.”

As Trent fell in with his companion’s rapid step, he seemed to be moving in a fine golden glow of enthusiasm.  A light icy drizzle had turned the snow upon the pavement into sloppy puddles of water, but to the young man, fresh from his inexperience, the hour and the scene alike were of exhilarating promise.

“I feel as if I had been breathing different air!” he exclaimed, without replying directly to the question.  “And yet how simple she is—­how utterly unlike the resplendent Mrs. Bridewell—­”

He stopped breathlessly, overcome by his excitement, and Adams took up the unfinished sentence almost tenderly.  “So far, of course, she is merely a beautiful promise, a flower in the bud,” he said.  “Her genius—­if she has genius—­has not found itself, and the notes she strikes are all mere groping attempts at a perfect self-expression.  Yet, undoubtedly, she has done a few fine things,” he admitted with professional caution.