Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/57

“Then you won’t give anything up? Even for my sake? I am disappointed———”

He walked away, feeling bitter and hurt, and leaned out into the garden. There was a low roll of thunder out at sea, and some big drops of rain fell like bullets here and there on the leaves. The palms in the woods shook and clattered together with a sharp metallic sound, like the clash of men in armour. The storm would be upon them directly. Alice looked at him, and her eyes slowly filled with tears. It was hard to part like this, yet she did not know how to make friends with him again. He looked very gloomy and unapproachable; it never occurred to him he had not said a word about love, and he thought she was foolishly setting her heart on this scheme of hers above everything a woman ought to prize.

She returned to the teaspoon and the “Funeral March of a Marionette,” while in her mind a passage out of a little drawing-room comedy she had once taken part in, kept repeating itself vexatiously, “If you want to make a man respect you, the best way is to refuse him.” In despair she took up her music and looked over it. She had brought down some of her songs, and on the top was a MS. copy of Mendelssohn’s 47th Psalm, arranged as a solo, as