ought to have been his. And he could not have married any woman who
would have suspected him of such brutality. He could only marry a
woman who was consummately suitable to him, in whom nothing jarred,
nothing offended; and his cousin Lucia was such a woman. The very fact
that she was his cousin was an assurance of her rightness. It followed
that, love being the expression of that perfect and predestined
harmony, he could only marry for love. Not for a great estate, for
Court House and the Harden Library. No, to do him justice, his seeking
of Lucia was independent of his reflection that these things would be
added unto him. Still, once married to Lucia, there was only Sir
Frederick and his infernal fiddle between him and ultimate, inviolable
possession; and Sir Frederick, to use his own phrase, had "about
played himself out." From what a stage and to what mad music!

From the east wing came the sound, not of his uncle's fiddle, but of
the music he desired, the tremendous and difficult music that, on a
hot July afternoon, taxed the delicate player's strength to its
utmost. Lucia began with Scarlatti and Bach; wandered off through
Schumann into Chopin, a moonlit enchanted wilderness of sound; paused,
and wound up superbly with Beethoven, the "Sonata Appassionata."

And as she came back to him over the green lawn she seemed to Jewdwine
to be trailing tumultuous echoes of her music; the splendour and the
passion of her playing hung about her like a luminous cloud. He rose
and went to meet her, and in his eyes there was a light, a light of
wonder and of worship.

"I think," she said, "you do look a little happier."

"I am tolerably happy, thanks."