She had no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer, she confessed, yet she sang as if possessed by him.  Had she, Patrick thought, been bent upon charming Philip, she could not have thrown more fire into the notes.  And when she had done, after thrilling the room, there was a gesture in her dismissal of the leaves displaying critical loftiness.  Patrick noticed it and said, with the thrill of her voice lingering in him:  ’What is it you do like?  I should so like to know.’

She was answering when Captain Con came up to the piano and remarked in an undertone to Patrick:  ’How is it you hit on the song Adiante Adister used to sing?’

Miss Mattock glanced at Philip.  He had applauded her mechanically, and it was not that circumstance which caused the second rush of scarlet over her face.  This time she could track it definitely to its origin.  A lover’s favourite song is one that has been sung by his love.  She detected herself now in the full apprehension of the fact before she had sung a bar:  it had been a very dim fancy:  and she denounced herself guilty of the knowledge that she was giving pain by singing the stuff fervidly, in the same breath that accused her of never feeling things at the right moment vividly.  The reminiscences of those pale intuitions made them always affectingly vivid.

But what vanity in our emotional state in a great jarring world where we are excused for continuing to seek our individual happiness only if we ally it and subordinate it to the well being of our fellows!  The interjection was her customary specific for the cure of these little tricks of her blood.  Leaving her friend Miss Barrow at the piano, she took a chair in a corner and said; ’Now, Mr. O’Donnell, you will hear the music that moves me.’

‘But it’s not to be singing,’ said Patrick.  ’And how can you sing so gloriously what you don’t care for?  It puzzles me completely.’

She assured him she was no enigma:  she hushed to him to hear.

He dropped his underlip, keeping on the conversation with his eyes until he was caught by the masterly playing of a sonata by the chief of the poets of sound.

He was caught by it, but he took the close of the introductory section, an allegro con brio, for the end, and she had to hush at him again, and could not resist smiling at her lullaby to the prattler.  Patrick smiled in response.  Exchanges of smiles upon an early acquaintance between two young people are peeps through the doorway of intimacy.  She lost sight of the Jesuit.  Under the influence of good music, too, a not unfavourable inclination towards the person sitting beside us and sharing that sweetness, will soften general prejudices—­if he was Irish, he was boyishly Irish, not like his inscrutable brother; a better, or hopefuller edition of Captain Con; one with whom something could be done to steady him, direct him, improve him.  He might be taught to appreciate Beethoven and work for his fellows.  ’Now does not that touch you more deeply than the Italian?’ said she, delicately mouthing:  ‘I, mio tradito amor!’