"I had no idea you were there," he said. "Hermann will do, won't he? I
think--"
And then suddenly the words of commonplace failed him, and he looked at
her in silence.
"I knew you were back," she said. "Hermann told me about--everything."
Michael glanced sideways, indicating his mother, who sat next him, and
was talking to Barbara.
"I wondered whether perhaps you would come and see my mother and me," he
said. "May I write?"
She looked at him with the friendliness of her smiling eyes and her
grave mouth.
"Is it necessary to ask?" she said.
Michael turned back to his seat, for his mother had had quite enough of
her sister-in-law, and wanted him again. She looked over her shoulder
for a moment to see whom Michael was talking to.
"I'm enjoying my concert, dear," she said. "And who is that nice young
lady? Is she a friend of yours?"
The interval was over, and Hermann returned to the platform, and waiting
for a moment for the buzz of conversation to die down, gave out,
without any preliminary excursion on the keys, the text of Michael's
"Variations." Then he began to tell them, with light and flying fingers,
what that simple tune had suggested to Michael, how he imagined himself
looking on at an old-fashioned dance, and while the dancers moved to
the graceful measure of a minuet, or daintily in a gavotte, the tune of
"Good King Wenceslas" still rang in his head, or, how in the joy of
the sunlight of a spring morning it still haunted him.
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