Under it he had been sitting in suspense, waiting for something, knowing and not daring to own to himself what it was he waited for.  The suspense and the waiting seemed all part of the original excitement.

Then Alice Cartaret came up the room.

Her passage had been obscured and obstructed by the crowd of villagers at the door.  But they had cleared a way for her and she came.

She carried herself like a crowned princess.  The cords of her cloak (it was of dove color, lined with blue) had loosened in her passage, and the cloak had slipped, showing her naked shoulders.  She wore a little dove-gray gown with some blue about it and a necklace of pale amber.  Her white arms hung slender as a child’s from the immense puffs of the sleeves.  Her fair hair was piled in front of a high amber comb.

As she appeared before the platform Rowcliffe rose and took her cloak from her (Greatorex saw him take it, but he didn’t care; he knew more about the doctor than the doctor knew himself).  He handed her up the steps on to the platform and then turned, like a man who has done all that chivalry requires of him, to his place between her sisters.  The hand that Rowcliffe had let go went suddenly to her throat, seizing her necklace and loosening it as if it choked her.  Rowcliffe was not looking at her.

Still with her hand at her throat, she smiled and bowed to the audience, to the choir, to Greatorex, to the schoolmaster who came forward (Greatorex cursed him) and led her to the piano.

She sat down, wiped her hands on her handkerchief, and waited, enduring like an angel the voices of the villagers and the shuffling of their feet.

Then somebody (it was the Vicar) said, “Hush!” and she began to play.  In her passion for the unattainable she had selected Chopin’s Grande Valse in A Flat, beginning with the long shake of eight bars.

Greatorex did not know whether she played well or badly.  He only knew it looked and sounded wonderful.  He could have watched forever her little hands that were like white birds.  He had never seen anything more delicious and more amusing than their fluttering in the long shake and their flying with spread wings all over the piano.

Then the jumping and the thumping began; and queer noises, the like of which Greatorex had never heard, came out of the piano.  It jarred him; but it made him smile.  The little hands were marvelous the way they flew, the way they leaped across great spaces of piano.

Alice herself was satisfied.  She had brought out the air; she had made it sing above the confusion of the bass and treble that evidently had had no clear understanding when they started; as for the bad bits, the tremendous crescendo chords that your hands must take at a flying leap or miss altogether, Rowcliffe had already assured her that they were impracticable anyhow; and Rowcliffe knew.

Flushed and softened with the applause (Rowcliffe had joined in it), she took her place between Greatorex and the schoolmaster.  The glee-singers, two men and two women, came forward and sang their glees, turning and bowing to each other like mummers.  The schoolmaster recited the “Pied Piper of Hamelin.”  A young lady who had come over from Morfe expressly for that purpose sang the everlasting song about the miller.