that won her esteem.  Girls were spring frosts to her.  Fronting Nesta, she put on her noted smile, or wood-cut of a smile, with its label of indulgence; except when the girl sang.  Music she loved.  She said it was the saving of poor Dudley.  It distinguished him in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family; and it gave him a subject of assured discourse in company; and oddly, it contributed to his comelier air.  Flute [This would be the German Blockeflute or our Recorder.  D.W.] in hand, his mouth at the blow-stop was relieved of its pained updraw by the form for puffing; he preserved a gentlemanly high figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken of all likeness to the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor’s punctuating trunk of the puffing frame at almost every bar—­an Apollo brilliancy in energetic pursuit of the nymph of sweet sound.  Too methodical one, too fiery the other.

In duets of Hauptmann’s, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast of dull smoothness and overstressed significance was very noticeable beside the fervent accuracy of her balanced fingering; and as she could also flute, she could criticize; though latterly, the flute was boxed away from lips that had devoted themselves wholly to song:  song being one of the damsel’s present pressing ambitions.  She found nothing to correct in Mr. Sowerby, and her father was open to all the censures; but her father could plead vitality, passion.  He held his performances cheap after the vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of his ‘dear old Corelli,’ or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and swaying forests of Beethoven.

His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment; the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle, as of a soul at holiday.  Eyes had been given this man to spy the pleasures and reveal the joy of his pasture on them:  gateways to the sunny within, issues to all the outer Edens.  Few of us possess that double significance of the pure sparkle.  It captivated Lady Grace.  She said a word of it to Fenellan:  ‘There is a man who can feel rapture!’ He had not to follow the line of her sight:  she said so on a previous evening, in a similar tone; and for a woman to repeat herself, using the very emphasis, was quaint.  She could feel rapture; but her features and limbs were in motion to designate it, between simply and wilfully; she had the instinct to be dimpling, and would not for a moment control it, and delighted in its effectiveness:  only when observing that winged sparkle of eyes did an idea of envy, hardly a consciousness, inform her of being surpassed; and it might be in the capacity to feel besides the gift to express.  Such a reflection relating to a man, will make women mortally sensible that they are the feminine of him.

‘His girl has the look,’ Fenellan said in answer.

She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.