But Aaron wasn’t heeding.  His flute was at his mouth, he was watching her.  He sounded the note, but she did not begin.  She was twisting her handkerchief.  So he played the melody alone.  At the end of the verse, he looked up at her again, and a half mocking smile played in his eyes.  Again he sounded the note, a challenge.  And this time, as at his bidding, she began to sing.  The flute instantly swung with a lovely soft firmness into the song, and she wavered only for a minute or two.  Then her soul and her voice got free, and she sang—­she sang as she wanted to sing, as she had always wanted to sing, without that awful scotch, that impediment inside her own soul, which prevented her.

She sang free, with the flute gliding along with her.  And oh, how beautiful it was for her!  How beautiful it was to sing the little song in the sweetness of her own spirit.  How sweet it was to move pure and unhampered at last in the music!  The lovely ease and lilt of her own soul in its motion through the music!  She wasn’t aware of the flute.  She didn’t know there was anything except her own pure lovely song-drift.  Her soul seemed to breathe as a butterfly breathes, as it rests on a leaf and slowly breathes its wings.  For the first time!  For the first time her soul drew its own deep breath.  All her life, the breath had caught half-way.  And now she breathed full, deep, to the deepest extent of her being.

And oh, it was so wonderful, she was dazed.  The song ended, she stood with a dazed, happy face, like one just coming awake.  And the fard on her face seemed like the old night-crust, the bad sleep.  New and luminous she looked out.  And she looked at Aaron with a proud smile.

“Bravo, Nan!  That was what you wanted,” said her husband.

“It was, wasn’t it?” she said, turning a wondering, glowing face to him.

His face looked strange and withered and gnome-like, at the moment.

She went and sat in her chair, quite silent, as if in a trance.  The two men also sat quite still.  And in the silence a little drama played itself between the three, of which they knew definitely nothing.  But Manfredi knew that Aaron had done what he himself never could do, for this woman.  And yet the woman was his own woman, not Aaron’s.  And so, he was displaced.  Aaron, sitting there, glowed with a sort of triumph.  He had performed a little miracle, and felt himself a little wonder-worker, to whom reverence was due.  And as in a dream the woman sat, feeling what a joy it was to float and move like a swan in the high air, flying upon the wings of her own spirit.  She was as a swan which never before could get its wings quite open, and so which never could get up into the open, where alone it can sing.  For swans, and storks make their music only when they are high, high up in the air.  Then they can give sound to their strange spirits.  And so, she.