The Argosy — page 384: what you’re looking at

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

370 Lost Harmony. and appreciated. Few girls live to be twenty without knowing that, and the other experience comes rather bitterly afterwards. The tree-shadows had grown long and dark in the gardens of the square, when he came into the room at last—softly, as he always comes, spell-bound, as I often fancy, by the mystic harmonies within. I rose slowly from my seat, trembling a little as I had lately learned to tremble, at his sudden presence, and spoke to him shyly. ‘¢ Herr Heinrich, are you not very late?” He did not answer me—he very rarely does until I have spoken several times—but he just smiled into my eyes before he sat down to the piano and ran his fingers—carelessly, it seemed, yet full caressingly, over the keys. As I said, I understand very little about such music as his ; but this I aid understand: that its tone always awakened in my heart an angry, wicked, terrible jealousy. “Herr Heinrich, are you ready for dinner 2ow ?” I made my pause so emphatic that it obliged him to look up, but as usual his eyes were full of far-away thoughts, and he seemed listening only to some far-off melody. Even then, while he looked at without seeing me, his fingers took a new strength, a sudden nervous power, and for a few minutes even I was lost in a wonderful dream I could not comprehend. A dream which fell in fragments of intense bitterness when Heinrich ceased and—forgetting my very presence—began rapidly to fill a blank sheet of music paper that lay on the table, engrossed by the harmonies which seemed surging in his brain. I turned again, and spoke as hope- fully as if I had not been rebuffed. ‘‘ Herr Heinrich, please don’t wait until your dinner is quite ruined —do come.” He just looked up from his score to nod to me, humming softly as he did so: and then, in spite of all, he went back to his writing and forgot me again. My eyes were full of scalding tears when I ordered in the dinner. ‘It is cold and spoiled,” I said: ‘‘go in and tell Mr. Werkle so.” Then I shut myself into Aunt Anna’s drawing-room, and cried as if my heart would break. They were not, by very, very many, the first tears he had made me shed; nor was that the first time I brushed them hastily away in shame, and vowed that he should make me shed no more. In the midst of my tears I had heard Heinrich’s quiet step cross the hall and enter the dining-room. Did he miss me? Did he wonder why I was not at my old post opposite him? I sat very up- right at my work, defiantly dry-eyed now. It did not matter whether he missed me or not: I would net go. He should be as silent as he chose to be. Only what a pity it was that I had taken so mucn trouble studying the programme of that concert on purpose to be able to talk to him about it! for it had really been hard work to CONNEC OOO a) SS (CO) i — om etl 2 — ne