“I want to rest a little,” he said, with his hand on her shoulder.

“Whew! so do I,” exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an exaggerated gesture of weariness.  “The sonatas take it out of one!  They are hideously difficult, you know.  They are rarely played.”

“I didn’t know,” remarked Theron.  She seemed not to mind his hand upon her shoulder, and he kept it there.  “I didn’t know anything about music at all.  What I do know now is that—­that this evening is an event in my life.”

She looked up at him and smiled.  He read unsuspected tendernesses and tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened him to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing trill upon her shoulder.  The movement was of the faintest, but having ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.

“You are getting on,” she said to him.  There was an enigmatic twinkle in the smile with which she continued to regard him.  “We are Hellenizing you at a great rate.”

A sudden thought seemed to strike her.  She shifted her eyes toward vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then let a sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost roguish smile mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.

“I will be with you in a moment,” he heard her say; and while the words were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through the broad, open doorway to the right.  The looped curtains fell together behind her.  Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately translucent surface—­a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect of moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.

Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.

“If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now.”

Her voice came to him with a delicious shock.  He wheeled round and beheld her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward, on the keys.  She was facing him.  Her tall form was robed now in some shapeless, clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft, like the curtains.  The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about her neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which made all the other hues of the room pale and vague.  A fillet of faint, sky-like blue drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her temples, and from this there rose the gleam of jewels.  Her head inclined gently, gravely, toward him—­with the posture of that armless woman in marble he had been studying—­and her brown eyes, regarding him from the shadows, emitted light.

“It is a lullaby—­the only one he wrote,” she said, as Theron, pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her.  “No—­you mustn’t stand there,” she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument; “go back and sit where you were.”