‘I want to do something for you in return for what you have done for me,’ he said.

He stood up and went to the piano.

‘Sit in this chair,’ he said.

She did not dream of disobeying.  He began to play.  Margaret was hardly surprised that he played marvellously.  Yet it was almost incredible that those fat, large hands should have such a tenderness of touch.  His fingers caressed the notes with a peculiar suavity, and he drew out of the piano effects which she had scarcely thought possible.  He seemed to put into the notes a troubling, ambiguous passion, and the instrument had the tremulous emotion of a human being.  It was strange and terrifying.  She was vaguely familiar with the music to which she listened; but there was in it, under his fingers, an exotic savour that made it harmonious with all that he had said that afternoon.  His memory was indeed astonishing.  He had an infinite tact to know the feeling that occupied Margaret’s heart, and what he chose seemed to be exactly that which at the moment she imperatively needed.  Then he began to play things she did not know.  It was music the like of which she had never heard, barbaric, with a plaintive weirdness that brought to her fancy the moonlit nights of desert places, with palm trees mute in the windless air, and tawny distances.  She seemed to know tortuous narrow streets, white houses of silence with strange moon-shadows, and the glow of yellow light within, and the tinkling of uncouth instruments, and the acrid scents of Eastern perfumes.  It was like a procession passing through her mind of persons who were not human, yet existed mysteriously, with a life of vampires.  Mona Lisa and Saint John the Baptist, Bacchus and the mother of Mary, went with enigmatic motions.  But the daughter of Herodias raised her hands as though, engaged for ever in a mystic rite, to invoke outlandish gods.  Her face was very pale, and her dark eyes were sleepless; the jewels of her girdle gleamed with sombre fires; and her dress was of colours that have long been lost.  The smile, in which was all the sorrow of the world and all its wickedness, beheld the wan head of the Saint, and with a voice that was cold with the coldness of death she murmured the words of the poet: 

’I am amorous of thy body, Iokanaan!  Thy body is white like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed.  Thy body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judea, and come down into the valleys.  The roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia are not so white as thy body.  Neither the roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia, the garden of spices of the Queen of Arabia, nor the feet of the dawn when they light on the leaves, nor the breast of the moon when she lies on the breast of the sea...  There is nothing in the world so white as thy body.  Suffer me to touch thy body.’

Oliver Haddo ceased to play.  Neither of them stirred.  At last Margaret sought by an effort to regain her self-control.