Afterwards, when they grouped themselves in the drawing-room, this constraint fell away.  Mrs. Hannaford dropped a remark which awakened memories of their life together at Geneva, and Piers turned to her with a bright look.

“You used to play in those days,” he said, “and I’ve never heard you touch a piano since.”

There was one in the room.  Olga glanced at it, and then smilingly at her mother.

“My playing was so very primitive,” said Mrs. Hannaford, with a laugh.

“I liked it.”

“Because you were a boy then.”

“Let me try to be a boy again.  Play something you used to.  One of those bits from ‘Tell,’ which take me back to the lakes and the mountains whenever I hear them.”

Mrs. Hannaford rose, laughing as if ashamed; Olga lit the candies on the piano.

“I shall have to play from memory—­and a nice mess I shall make of it.”

But memory served her for the passages of melody which Piers wished to hear.  He listened with deep pleasure, living again in the years when everything he desired seemed a certainty of the future, depending only on the flight of time, on his becoming “a man.”  He remembered his vivid joy in the pleasures of the moment, the natural happiness now, and for years, unknown to him.  So long ago, it seemed; yet Mrs. Hannaford, sitting at the piano, looked younger to him than in those days.  And Olga, whom as a girl of fourteen he had not much liked, thinking her both conceited and dull, now was a very different person to him, a woman who seemed to have only just revealed herself, asserting a power of attraction he had never suspected in her.  He found himself trying to catch glimpses of her face at different angles, as she sat listening abstractedly to the music.

When it was time to go, he took leave with reluctance.  The talk had grown very pleasantly familiar.  Mrs. Hannaford said she hoped they would often see him, and the hope had an echo in his own thoughts.  This house might offer him the refuge he sought when loneliness weighed too heavily.  It was true, he could not accept the idea with a whole heart; some vague warning troubled his imagination; but on the way home he thought persistently of the pleasure he had experienced, and promised himself that it should be soon repeated.

A melody was singing in his mind; becoming conscious of it, he remembered that it was the air to which his friend Moncharmont had set the little song of Alfred de Musset.  At Odessa he had been wont to sing it—­in a voice which Moncharmont declared to have the quality of a very fair tenor, and only to need training.

   “Quand on perd. par triste occurrence,
    Son esperance
    Et sa gaite,
    Le remede au melancolique
    O’est la musique
    Et la beaute.

    Plus oblige et peut davantage
    Un beau visage
    Qu’un homme arme,
    Et rien n’est meilleur que d’entendre
    Air doux et tendre
    Jadin alme!”