Her pale eyes, half sullen, half afraid, slewed round to the door of the study on her right.  With a noiseless hand she secured her matches and her candle.  With noiseless feet she slid into the darkness of the drawing-room.  She dared not light her candle out there in the passage.  For the Vicar was full of gloom and of suspicion in the half hour before prayer-time, and at the spurt of the match he might come out blustering and insist on knowing what she was doing and where she was going, whereas presently he would know, and he might be quiet as long as he was satisfied that she wasn’t shirking Prayers.

Stealthily, with her air of desperate adventure, she lit the drawing-room lamp.  She shook out the puffs and frills of its yellow paper shade.  Under its gaudy skirts the light was cruel to the cramped and shabby room, to the huddled furniture, to the tarnished gilt, the perishing tones of gray and amber.

Alice set the lamp on the top of the cottage piano that stood slantwise in a side window beyond the fireplace.  She had pulled back the muslin curtains and opened both windows wide so that the room was now bared to the south and west.  Then, with the abrupt and passionate gesture of desire deferred, she sat down at the little worn-out Erard and began to play.

Sitting there, with the open window behind her, she could be seen, and she knew that she could be seen from over the wall by anybody driving past in a high dog-cart.

And she played.  She played the Chopin Grande Polonaise, or as much of it as her fingers, tempestuous and inexpert, could clutch and reach.  She played, neither with her hands nor with her brain, but with her temperament, febrile and frustrate, seeking its outlet in exultant and violent sound.  She fell upon the Erard like some fierce and hungry thing, tearing from the forlorn, humble instrument a strange and savage food.  She played—­with incredible omissions, discords and distortions, but she played.  She flung out her music through the windows into the night as a signal and an appeal.  She played (on the little worn-out Erard) in ecstasy and expectation, as if something momentous hung upon her playing.  There was joy and triumph and splendor in the Grande Polonaise; she felt them in her heart and nerves as a delicate, dangerous tremor, the almost intolerable on coming of splendor, of triumph and of joy.

And as she played the excitement gathered; it swung in more and more vehement vibrations; it went warm and flooding through her brain like wine.  All the life of her bloodless body swam there, poised and thinned, but urgent, aspiring to some great climax of the soul.

VII

The whole house was full of the Chopin Grande Polonaise.

It raged there like a demon.  Tortured out of all knowledge, the Grande Polonaise screamed and writhed in its agony.  It writhed through the windows, seeking its natural attenuation in the open air.  It writhed through the shut house and was beaten back, pitilessly, by the roof and walls.  To let it loose thus was Alice’s defiance of the house and her revenge.