“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Away!  Away!” he answered.  “Anywhere that’s away.  The air is rank with Oscar Wilde and the Renaissance.  I feel them coming.”  Still laughing, he bounded upstairs, three steps at a time.

Sylvia stepped forward, crossed the threshold of the living-room, and paused by the piano, penetrated by bitter-sweet associations.  If Morrison felt them also, he gave no sign.  He had chosen a chair by a distant window and was devoting himself to Molly’s grandfather, who accepted this delicate and entirely suitable attention with a rather glum face.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith and Page still stood in the center of the room, and turned as Sylvia came in.  “Do give us some music, Sylvia,” said her aunt, sinking into a chair while Page came forward to sit near the piano.

Sylvia’s fingers rested on the keys for a moment, her face very grave, almost somber, and then, as though taking a sudden determination, she began to play a Liszt Liebes-Traum.  It was the last music Morrison had played to her before the beginning of the change.  Into its fevered cadences she poured the quivering, astonished hurt of her young heart.

No one stirred during the music nor for the moment afterward, in which she turned about to face the room.  She looked squarely at Morrison, who was rolling a cigarette with meticulous care, and as she looked, he raised his eyes and gave her across the room one deep, flashing glance of profound significance.  That was all.  That was enough.  That was everything.  Sylvia turned back to the piano shivering, hot and cold with secret joy.  His look said, “Yes, of course, a thousand times of course, you are the one in my heart.”  What the facts said for him was, “But I am going to marry Molly because she has money.”

Sylvia was horrified that she did not despise him, that she did not resent his entering her heart again with the intimacy of that look.  Her heart ran out to welcome him back; but from the sense of furtiveness she shrank back with her lifetime habit and experience of probity, with the instinctive distaste for stealth engendered only by long and unbroken acquaintance with candor.  With a mental action as definite as the physical one of freeing her feet from a quicksand she turned away from the alluring, dim possibility opened to her by that look.  No, no!  No stains, no smears, no shufflings!  She was conscious of no moral impulse, in the usual sense of the word.  Her imagination took in no possibility of actual wrong.  But when, with a fastidious impulse of good taste, she turned her back on something ugly, she turned her back unwittingly on something worse than ugly.

But it was not easy!  Oh, not at all easy!  She quailed with a sense of her own weakness, so unexpected, so frightening.  Would she resist it the next time?  How pierced with helpless ecstasy she had been by that interchange of glances!  What was there, in that world, by which she could steady herself?