The Argosy — page 216: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

202 How it Happened, but a wall of embarrassment had risen up between us since our last meeting. We were alone together in the dusky drawing-room after tea, but conversation failed us even then, and at last I asked him to play to me. He went to the piano at once, and I sat near the window and watched his hands, as I listened to the river of melody which began to flow through the shadowy chamber. I saw that he had still his old habit of stooping as he played, as if to listen for what the notes would say, and of then suddenly raising his head in an attentive attitude, as though he were looking out and waiting for an answer from above. I was in a dreamy trance of enjoyment, when the music suddenly came to an abrupt stop, and the player said slowly, ‘‘ Your friends, the Miss Perrins, do not ever come to the choir practice now.” “They do not,” I answered. At the moment I could think of nothing else to say. “Could you tell me how it was that I offended Miss Frances Perrin?” he continued, hesitatingly. I grew confused, and delayed a little before I faltered out the monosyllable, “‘ No.” “T might have guessed not,” he said, bitterly, and after that we sat for a while without speaking. At last I said quickly, “ Why do you call her Miss Frances Perrin ? she is the elder of the two girls.” An exclamation of pain floated over to me through the gloom, with a wailing sound; something as though it had been a prayer. He turned from the piano, and began speaking eagerly. “I did not know,” he said. ‘I always believed she was the younger. Will you tell her ——” But just at this moment a servant brought in candles, and then my husband joined us. He was full of a journey which he had just learned it would be necessary for him to take on the following day. There was business to be done in Weston, which was distant about thirty miles from the railway junction, and this, as I said before, lay ten miles from us. I was shocked to see the terrible alteration that the past few months had wrought in. our friend’s appearance when I observed him by the full light now in the room. He looked ill and worn, and yet there was certainly, at this moment, a hopeful, animated gleam in his face which had not been there when John brought him to me, a couple ot hours before, in the other chamber. He spoke, too, in readier and more lively tones, now, than he had used all the evening, as he told us that he, also, had engaged to go next morning to Weston, on banking affairs. “‘ The manager asked me to undertake some business there for him,” he said, ‘‘and I agreed, not caring whether I went or stayed, although the weather is certainly unpleasantly hot and dusty for \a: long? and comicbooks.com