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“I beg your pardon. Though I am no judge of music, when I was at university one chap used to treat the lot of us to musical evenings often. And while I have heard many pieces, including the one you played tonight, played perfectly correctly …” he stopped, and coloured, and looked at the floor. “I have never heard any piece played with such feeling. It sounded as if you meant it.”

There was no flourishing about it. He did not bow, or smile, or wait for her to be pleased; he said it, and looked away, as a man puts down a small object he has carried a long way. She stood quite still. She was conscious of having been paid, in those seven words, the only compliment of the evening that she should remember; and of having been paid it, with a kind of terror, by a man who wished nothing whatever to be made of it.

“Thank you,” said Marianne. “I did.”

He nodded, once. He did not say more.

She found Margaret, presently, upon the terrace, where she had gone out for the air and to be out of the way of a gentleman who wished to describe his stable. It was a soft, warm night, with a moon in a clear sky, and the noise of the drawing-room came out through the open windows as from a distance, a murmur of voices and laughter and a single, thin, high violin; and Margaret, standing at the balustrade, in her white gown, with a shawl about her shoulders, turned her head at her sister’s step.

“You played beautifully.”

“I played too much. I always do.” Marianne came to stand beside her.

“It is one of my favourite things in all the world, hearing you play.”

Marianne reached over and hugged her sister. “I am beyond happy to have you back, my dear. I hope you are enjoying the evening. I noticed Mr. Tregarth has arrived.”

Margaret’s face lit up. “I did not know if he would come tonight,” she replied. After a moment of hesitation she said, “Will you excuse me, Marianne? I have something of interest I need to speak to him about.”

“Of course, my dear. Go, enjoy yourself.”

Margaret was off in an instant, but Marianne stayed behind for several minutes in deep contemplation.

Chapter XXI.

The house in Portman Square wore, that morning, the hush of a household that has lately had a great deal of noise in it and is now, by universal and unspoken agreement, tiptoeing. Margaret had been told as much by the footman, who took her pelisse with the solemnity of a man handling something breakable, and murmured that Mrs. Wren was very well, and would be delighted, and would Miss Dashwood come up directly, as the whole family was assembled in the small drawing-room and had been asking after her since Thursday.

She went up the stairs a great deal faster than was strictly graceful. She had had the letter three days before — a single sheet, in a hand a good deal less steady than Cecilia’s usual decided scrawl,

Come meet your beautiful niece, Aunt Margaret! We are all extremely well, and you must come the moment you can be spared.

Yours always,

Cecilia

She had spent the whole of the intervening three days in a fever of the most delightful speculation, and had arrived, in consequence, with her bonnet not quite straight and her gloves in her reticule instead of on her hands, which she discovered only upon the landing, and had no time to remedy before the door was opened.

The small drawing-room was a scene of the most complete domestic contentment. There was Professor Aylmer, in his second-best coat, down upon the hearthrug in an attitude that no reader of any dignity would readily assume, with his spectacles pushed up into his hair and a look of besotted concentration upon his face; there was Mrs. Aylmer, upright as ever in the best chair, directing operations with the same brisk authority she had once brought to a Theban excavation; and there, upon the sofa, a little pale, and a little tired, and entirely radiant, sat Cecilia, with a small white bundle in the crook of her arm, and her husband perched on the arm of the sofa beside her with the dazed, tender, slightly incredulous expression of a man who has lately discovered that the world contains a great deal more feeling than he had previously been informed of.

“Margaret!” Cecilia’s face lit further, if such a thing were possible. “Oh, thank heaven — shut the door, quick, before Mamma has the fire built up any higher, we shall all of us be roasted before luncheon. Come here. Come and see.”

Margaret came. She crossed the room as one crosses a room in a dream, with the whole of it a little unsteady underfoot; and she knelt down by the sofa, and looked into the small, cross, magnificently indifferent face that was scowling up out of its wrappings at the assembled company, as if it had already formed a low opinion of the world and did not intend to be talked out of it.

“She is always furious,” said Cecilia, with enormous pride. “She has been furious since Thursday. Thomas says it is the family temper coming out early, and I have told him that it is entirely his own family’s fault, as no Aylmer was ever known to scowl before the age of two months at the very earliest.”

“She is beautiful,” said Margaret, and found that her voice was not perfectly steady. “Cecilia, she is the most beautiful — what is her name? You did not say, in the letter, you dreadful creature, you only said come, and I have not slept properly since.”

There was a small silence, of the kind that gathers before a piece of very good news, in which Cecilia and Thomas Wren exchanged a look that had clearly been rehearsed, and the Professor, from the hearthrug, made a sound suspiciously like a sniff, and Mrs. Aylmer folded her hands with the satisfaction of a woman about to see a long-planned scheme come off exactly as intended.

“Her name,” said Cecilia, “is Margaret.”

Margaret went very still.

“We shall call her Meg,” Cecilia went on, a little too fast, in the manner of a person who has been saving up a speech and is determined to get to the end of it before she is interrupted by her own feelings. “It seemed to us — it seemed to me, and to Thomas, and Mamma and Papa were both entirely of one mind about it, which you must own is a very great rarity — that there was nobody in the whole of England we should rather she was named for. You have been the whole of my life since I was fourteen years old, Margaret Dashwood. You climbed down into a chalk pit after me. You have crossed an ocean and I have not, though I own I mean to remedy that; you have been my sister in everything but the actual document, and I could not — I would not — have a daughter of mine go through the world without your name in her somewhere, to keep her honest.”

Margaret found that she could not, for the moment, say anything whatever. She looked down at the small furious face, and up at Cecilia’s, and found both of them swimming a little; and it was the Professor, hauling himself up from the hearthrug with a groan that he did not trouble to disguise, who came and put a hand upon her shoulder.

“You are not to cry into the baby, my dear,” said he, not unkindly. “It has been tried already this morning, by her mother, in considerable quantity, and I understand from the nurse that it does not agree with the linen.”