The sense that something in some way or other decisive was going to happen to-night, quickened her pulse as she mounted, along with the last of their guests to the music room, in response to Paula’s message that Mr. March had come and that the “rehearsal” was about to begin.  She looked about eagerly for a man who might be March but could not discover him anywhere.  Was he, perhaps, she absurdly wondered, sitting once more under the piano?

Novelli drooped over the keyboard.  LaChaise was half hidden in a deep chair in one of the dormers.  Paula, her back to the little audience, stood talking to Novelli.  Mary allowed herself a faint smile over the expression in those faces that Paula wouldn’t look at.  The half-concealed impatience, the anticipatory boredom, showed through so unfaltering a determination to do and express to the end the precisely correct thing.  Even her father’s anger looked out through a mask like that.

LaChaise, from his corner said something in French that Mary didn’t catch.  Novelli straightened his back.  And in that instant before a note was sounded, Mary’s excitement mounted higher.  The absorption of those three musicians, the intensity of their preoccupation, told her that the something she had expected was going to happen—­now.  But she did not know that it was going to happen to her.

Long ago the family had acquiesced in Mary’s assertion that she was not in the least musical and in her stubborn refusal to “take” anything, even the most elementary course of lessons on the piano.  She had been allowed to grow up in an ignorance almost unique in these days, of the whole mystery of musical notation and phraseology, an ignorance that might be reckoned the equivalent of a special talent.

Later, indeed, she had made the discovery—­or what would have been a discovery if she had fully admitted it to herself—­that music sometimes exerted a special power over her emotions.  Whether it was a certain sort of music that created the mood or a certain sort of mood that was capable of responding to music, she had never seriously inquired.  The critical jargon of the wiseacres always irritated her.  She supposed it meant something because they seemed intelligible to each other but she rather enjoyed indulging the presumption that it did not.  When she went to concerts, she liked to go alone, or at least to be let alone, to sit back passively and allow the variegated tissue of sound to envelop her spirit as it would.  If it bored her, as it frequently did, there was no harm done, no pretense to make.  If, as more rarely happened, it stole somehow into complete possession, floated her away upon strange voyages, she was at least immune from analysis and inquisition afterward.

So it was with no critical expectancy that she listened when Novelli began to play; indeed, in the active sense, she did not listen at all.  She forgot to be amused by the composed faces about her; she forgot, presently, whose music it was and whose voice she heard.  What she felt was a disentanglement, an emergence into more open, wider spaces,—­cold ethereal spaces.  It seemed, though, that it was her own mood the music fitted into, rather than the other way about.