The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once more, passed, so to speak, over Theron’s head.  He leaned back upon the cushions, and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds of this strange, statue-like drapery made bare.

There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade.  It seemed to him that there were words going along with it—­incoherent and impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument and persuasion.  Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into a mockery of inconsequence.

Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a soft-throated woman singing to her lover.

“It is like Heine—­simply a love-poem,” said the girl, over her shoulder.

Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth Nocturne onward.  The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth, was in truth a lover’s quarrel; and then the mild, placid flow of sweet harmonies into which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a silence all alive with tender memories of sound—­was that not also a part of love?

They sat motionless through a minute—­the man on the divan, the girl at the piano—­and Theron listened for what he felt must be the audible thumping of his heart.

Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she had withheld for the last—­the Sixteenth Mazurka.  This strange foreign thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair.  He fancied her beholding visions as she wrought the music—­visions full of barbaric color and romantic forms.  As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these visions—­as if he gazed at them through her eyes.

It could not be helped.  He lifted himself noiselessly to his feet, and stole with caution toward her.  He would hear the rest of this weird, voluptuous fantasy standing thus, so close behind her that he could look down upon her full, uplifted lace—­so close that, if she moved, that glowing nimbus of hair would touch him.

There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this last piece, which Theron, by some side cerebration, had put down to her not watching what her fingers did.  There came another of these pauses now—­an odd, unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything.  He stared intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face during the hush, and caught his breath as he waited.  There fell at last a few faltering ascending notes, making a half-finished strain, and then again there was silence.