Chapter 45 - Page 2

young man
--this boy, who came with his prattle when she wished to be alone. It was
very uncomfortable for him.

"I hope you are not feeling unwell, Miss Starbrow," he ventured to
remark.

"Feeling sick, the Americans say," she corrected scornfully. "Do I look
it?"

"You look rather pale, I think," he returned, a little frightened.

"Do I?" glancing at the mirror. "Ah, yes, that is because I am out of
rouge. I only use one kind; it is sent to me from Paris, and I let it get
too low before ordering a fresh supply."

He laughed incredulously.

Miss Starbrow looked offended. "Are you so shortsighted and so innocent
as to imagine that the colour you generally see on my face is natural,
Mr. Theed? What a vulgar blowzy person you must have thought me! If I had
such a colour naturally, I should of course use _blanc de perle_ or
something to hide it. There is a considerable difference--even a very
young man might see it, I should think--between rouge and the crude
blazing red that nature daubs on a milkmaid's cheeks."

He did not quite know how to take it, and changed the conversation, only
to get snubbed and mystified in the same way about other things, until he
was made thoroughly miserable; and in watching his misery she experienced
a secret savage kind of pleasure.

No sooner had he gone than she sat down to the piano, and began
singing, song after song, as she had never sung before--English,
German, French, Italian--songs of passion and of pain--Beethoven's
_Kennst du das Land_, and Spohr's _Rose softly blooming_, and
Blumenthal's _Old, Old Story_, and then _Il Segreto_ and _O mio
Fernando_ and _Stride la vampa_, and rising to heights she seldom
attempted, _Modi ab modi_ and _Ab fors' è lui che l'anima_;
pouring forth without restraint all the long-pent yearing of her heart,
all the madness and misery of a desire which might be expressed in no
other way; until outside in the street the passers-by slackened their
steps and lingered before the windows, wondering at that strange storm of
melody. And at last, as an appropriate ending to such a storm, Domencio
Thorner's _Se solitaria preghi la sera_--that perfect echo of the
heart's most importunate feeling, and its fluctuatons, when plangent
passion sinks its voice like the sea, rocking itself to rest, and nearly
finds forgetful calm; until suddenly the old pain revives--the pain that
cannot keep silence, the hunger of the heart, the everlasting sorrow--and
swells again in great and greater waves of melody.

There could be no other song after that. She shut the piano with a bang,
which caused the servants standing close to the door outside to jump