He took it up gaily.  “Then I may be absorbed in you?  So, after all, it turns out to my advantage.”

“Yes.  You can console me.  You can console me now, this minute, if you’ll play to me.”

He was always lamenting that he could do nothing for her.  Playing to her was the one thing he could do, and he did it well.

He rose joyously and went to the piano, removing the dust from the keys with his handkerchief.  “How will you have it?  Sentimental and soporific?  Or loud and strong?”

“Oh, loud and strong, please.  Very strong and very loud.”

“Right you are.  You shall have it hot and strong, and loud enough to wake the dead.”

That was his rendering of Chopin’s “Grande Polonaise.”  He let himself loose in it, with a rush, a vehemence, a diabolic brilliance and clamour.  The quiet room shook with the sounds he wrenched out of the little humble piano in the corner.  And as Edith lay and listened, her spirit, too, triumphed, and was free; it rode gloriously on the storm of sound.  It was, she said, laughing, quite enough to wake the dead.  This was the miracle that he alone could accomplish for her.

And downstairs in the study, Anne heard his music and started, as the dead may start in their sleep.  It seemed to her, that Polonaise of Chopin, the most immoral music, the music of defiance and revolt.  It flung abroad the prodigal’s prodigality, his insolent and iniquitous joy.  That was what he, a bad man, made of an innocent thing.

Majendie’s face lit up, responsive to the delight and challenge of the opening chord.  “He’s all right,” said he, “as long as he can play.”

He listened, glancing now and then at Anne with a smile of pride in his friend’s performance.  It was as if he were asking her to own that there must be some good in a fellow who could play like that.

Anne was considering in what words she would intimate to him that Mr. Gorst’s music was never to be heard again in that house.  Some instinct told her that she was courting danger, but the approval of her conscience urged her on.  She waited till the Polonaise was over before she spoke.

“You say,” said she, “he’s all right as long as he can play like that.  To me, it’s the most convincing proof that he’s all wrong.”

“How do you make that out?”

“I don’t want to go into it,” said Anne.  “I don’t approve of Mr. Gorst; but I should think better of him if he had only better taste.”

“You’re the first person who ever accused Gorst of bad taste.”

“Do you call it good taste to live as he does, as I know he does, and you know he does, and yet to come here, and sit with Edie, and behave as if he’d never done anything to be ashamed of?  It would be infinitely better taste if he kept away.”

“Not at all.  There are a great many very nice things about Gorst, and his caring to come here is one of the nicest.  He has been faithful to Edith for ten years.  That sort of thing isn’t so common that one can afford to despise it.”