‘Oh,’ said Jocelyn, ’mamma has not yet allowed us to study the condition of the lower classes in France.  We are all so busy with the new Settlement.’

‘It must be very exhausting, my dear child,’ said Lord Francis.

I rose.

‘I came to ask you to play something,’ the child appealed to me.  ’I have never heard you play, and everyone says—­’

‘Jocelyn, my pet,’ the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis floated across the room.

‘What, mamma?’

’You are not to trouble Miss Peel.  Perhaps she does not feel equal to playing.’

My blood rose in an instant.  I cannot tell why, unless it was that I resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I was not entirely myself.  The latent antagonism between us became violently active in my heart.  I believe I blushed.  I know that I felt murderous towards Mrs. Sardis.  I gave her my most adorable smile, and I said, with sugar in my voice: 

‘But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.’

It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening phrase of Chopin’s first Ballade, that composition so laden with formidable memories—­begun it without thinking and without apprehension—­showed how far I had lost my self-control.  Not that the silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past.  No!  But I saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she.  She was for me one of those ladies that have loved and are dead.  The simplicity of her mind and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed unbearably piteous to me.  Why, I knew not.  The pathos of that brief and vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess.  And then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in a truth-revealing mirror.  My fame, and my knowledge and my experience, my trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love, to whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman expecting her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous; a woman with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who was at once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love.  How often have I called my dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz!  Let me be less unjust, and say that he, too, was the victim of love.  What was Diaz but the instrument of the god?

Jocelyn stood near me by the piano.  I glanced at her as I played, and smiled.  She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my gaze suddenly to the keyboard.  ‘You too!’ I thought sadly, ’You too!...  One day!  One day even you will know what life is, and the look in those innocent eyes will never be innocent again!’