He worked late that night and she told him of a short cut to the town by the river path at the bottom of the garden.  Half-way to the river he stopped and looked back.  The beech tree dreamed, silent on a slope of glimmering lawn.  The house loomed in the background, a grey mass with blurred outlines.  From a window open in the east wing he could hear the sound of a piano.

He stood still and listened.  All around was the tender, indescribable Devonshire night; it hung about him with warm scented breath; he felt its heart beat in the innumerable pulses of the stars.  Behind the blue transparent darkness the music throbbed like a dawn; it swayed and sank, piano, pianissimo, and streamed out again into the night, dividing the darkness.  It flowed on in a tumult, a tremendous tumult, rhythmic and controlled.  What was she playing?  If he stayed till midnight he must hear it through.  Night sheltered him, and he drew nearer lest he should lose a note.  He stretched himself on the lawn, and, with his head on his arms, he lay under the beech-tree, under the stars, dreaming, while Lucia Harden played to him the Sonata Appassionata.

It was good to be there; but he did not know, and the music did not tell him why he was there and what he was there for.

And yet it was the Sonata Appassionata.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was the afternoon of Saturday the fourth that Mr. Rickman, looking up from his table, saw a brilliant apparition coming across the lawn.  He dreaded afternoon callers, he dreaded the post, he dreaded every person and every thing which reminded him that Lucia Harden had a life that he knew not and that knew not him.

“Lucia—­Lucia!” Mr. Rickman looked up and saw the brilliant apparition standing in the south window.  “Lu-chee-a!—­” it pleaded.  “You can’t say you’re out when I can see perfectly well that you’re in.”

“Go away Kitty, I’m busy.”

“You’ve no business to be busy at five o’clock in the afternoon.”

Miss Kitty Palliser’s body was outside the window, but her head, crowned with a marvellous double-peaked hat of Parma violets, was already within the room.

“I’m dying of thirst,” she said; “take me in and be kind to me and give me tea.”

Lucia rose and went to the window, reluctant but resigned.  Scraps of their conversation floated down to Mr. Rickman’s end of the room.

“Yes, you may well look at my hat.”

“I wasn’t looking at it, I was looking through it.”

“Well, if you can see through my hat, Lucia, you can see through me.  What do you think of it?”

“Of the hat?  Oh, the hat is a poem.”

“Isn’t it?  Did you ever see anything so inspired, so impassioned?”

“Inspired, but—­don’t you think—­just a little, a little meaningless?”

“Meaningless?  It’s packed with meaning.”

“I should like to know what it means.”