As he spoke, a girl’s figure stepped from the house to the veranda, from the veranda to the turf of the terrace, and walked towards them.  She was tall, and strongly, beautifully built; around her small head was bound a smooth braid of dark hair.  She walked with a long, free step and held her head high.  As she came towards them, the moonlight full on her dark, proud, perfect face, she might have been the youthful Diana.

But it was no antique spirit which looked out of those frank, fearless eyes, and it was a very modern and colloquially American greeting which she now gave to the astonished young people.  “Well, Sylvia, don’t you know your own sister?” and “Hello there, Arnold.”

“Why, Judith Marshall!” cried Sylvia, falling upon her breathlessly.  “However in the world did you get here!”

Arnold said nothing.  He had fallen back a step and now looked at the new-comer with a fixed, dazzled gaze.

CHAPTER XXIV

ANOTHER BRAND OF MODERN TALK

“Where’s Judith?” said Arnold for sole greeting, as he saw Morrison at the piano and Sylvia sitting near it, cool and clear in a lacy white dress.  Morrison lifted long fingers from the keys and said gravely, “She came through a moment ago, saying, ‘Where’s Arnold?’ and went out through that door.”  His fingers dropped and Chopin’s voice once more rose plaintively.

The sound of Arnold’s precipitate rush across the room and out of the door was followed by a tinkle of laughter from Sylvia.  Morrison looked around at her over his shoulder, with a flashing smile of mutual understanding, but he finished the prelude before he spoke.  Then, without turning around, as he pulled out another sheet from the music heaped on the piano, he remarked:  “If that French philosopher was right when he said no disease is as contagious as love-making, we may expect soon to find the very chairs and tables in this house clasped in each other’s arms.  Old as I am, I feel it going to my head, like a bed of full-blooming valerian.”

Sylvia made no answer.  She felt herself flushing, and could not trust her voice to be casual.  He continued for a moment to thumb over the music aimlessly, as though waiting for her to speak.

The beautiful room, darkened against the midsummer heat, shimmered dimly in a transparent half-light, the vivid life of its bright chintz, its occasional brass, its clean, daring spots of crimson and purple flowers, subdued into a fabulous, half-seen richness.  There was not a sound.  The splendid heat of the early August afternoon flamed, and paused, and held its breath.

Into this silence, like a bird murmuring a drowsy note over a still pool, there floated the beginning of Am Meer.  Sylvia sat, passive to her finger-tips, a vase filled to the brim with melody.  She stared with unseeing eyes at the back of the man at the piano.  She was not thinking of him, she was not aware that she was conscious of him at all; but hours afterward wherever she looked, she saw for an instant again in miniature the slender, vigorous, swaying figure; the thick brown hair, streaked with white and curling slightly at the ends; the brooding head....