“Come in here, Nan,” he said briefly.

Somewhat reluctantly she followed him into the room.  He closed the door behind her, then swung round on his heel so that they stood fronting one another.

At the sight of his face she recoiled a step in sheer nervous astonishment.  It was a curious ashen-white, and from beneath drawn brows his hawk’s eyes seemed positively to blaze at her.

“Roger,” she stammered, “what—­what is it?”

“Is it true?” he demanded, ignoring her halting question, and fixing her with a glance that seemed to penetrate right through her.

“Is—­is what true?” she faltered.

“Is it true—­what Isobel said—­that you look down on us because we’re countrified, that you’re still hankering after that precious artistic crew of yours in London?”

He spoke violently—­so violently that it roused Nan’s spirit.  She turned away from him.

“Don’t be so absurd, Roger,” she said contemptuously.  “Isobel was only joking.  It was very silly of her, but it’s sillier still for you to take any notice of what she said.”

“She was not joking.  You’ve shown it clearly enough—­ever since you came here—­that you’re dissatisfied—­bored!  Do you suppose I haven’t seen it?  I’m not blind!  And I won’t stand it!  If your music is going to come between us, I’ll smash the piano—­”

“Roger!  You ridiculous person!”

She was smiling now.  Something in his anger reminded her of an enraged small boy.  It woke in her the eternal motherhood which lies in every woman and she felt that she wanted to comfort him.  She could forgive him his violence.  In his furious antagonism towards the art which meant so much to her, she traced the combined influence of Lady Gertrude and Isobel.  Not merely the latter’s pin-pricks at dinner this particular evening, but the constant pressure of criticism of which she was the subject.

“You ridiculous person!  If you did smash the piano, it wouldn’t make me any less a musician.  And”—­lightly—­“I really can’t have you being jealous of an inanimate thing like a grand piano!”

Roger’s frown relaxed a little.  His threat to smash the piano sounded foolish even in his own ears.  But he hated the instrument none the less, although without precisely knowing why.  Subconsciously he was aware that the real Nan still eluded him.  She was his in the eyes of the world—­pledged to be his wife—­yet he knew that although he might possess her body it would bring him no nearer the possession of her soul and spirit.  That other man—­the one for whom she had told him she once cared—­held those!  Trenby was not given to psychological analysis, but in a blind, bewildered fashion he felt that that thing of wood and ivory and stretched strings represented in concrete form everything that stood betwixt himself and Nan.

“Have I nothing else—­no one else”—­significantly—–­“to be jealous of?” he demanded.  “Answer me!”