"Capital! Where's Miss Filberte?"

"Here I am!" piped a thin alto voice.

There was a rustle of skirts as the accompanist rose hastily from her
chair.

"Sit down, please, Miss Filberte," said Lady Holme in a voice of ice.

Miss Filberte sat down like one who has been knocked on the head with a
hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that
raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright, and
played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was so
determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still thinking
about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:

"Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly
dish omitted."

Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme's eyes,
changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence. She
leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang, looking
up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had the clear
melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought the stars out
within that room and set purple distances before the eyes. Water swayed
in it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm weather, when the
black spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours are motionless as
fingers of skeletons pointing towards the moon. Mysterious lights lay
round a silent shore. And in the wide air, on the wide waters, one woman