with Eve for noticing her discomfiture and with the forgotten guest for
her silly remark. She knew she had simply poked the piano. Then there
had been the annual school concert, all the girls almost unrecognisable
with fear. She had learnt her pieces by heart for those occasions and
played them through with trembling limbs and burning eyes--alternately
thumping with stiff fingers and feeling her whole hand faint from the
wrist on to the notes which fumbled and slurred into each other almost
soundlessly until the thumping began again. At the musical evenings,
organised by Eve as a winter set-off to the tennis-club, she had both
played and sung, hoping each time afresh to be able to reproduce the
effects which came so easily when she was alone or only with Eve. But
she could not discover the secret of getting rid of her nervousness.
Only twice had she succeeded--at the last school concert when she had
been too miserable to be nervous and Mr. Strood had told her she did him
credit and, once she had sung "Chanson de Florian" in a way that had
astonished her own listening ear--the notes had laughed and thrilled out
into the air and come back to her from the wall behind the piano. . . .
The day before the tennis tournament.



6


The girls were all settling down to fancy work, the white-cuffed hands
of the Martins were already jerking crochet needles, faces were bending
over fine embroideries and Minna Blum had trundled a mounted lace-pillow
into the brighter light.

Miriam went to the schoolroom and fetched from her work-basket the piece