But if on your ears there falls anything like a dirge, or the wail of a lost spirit gone mad, better look to your soup and see if it hasn't been scorched, or taste of your pudding and see if you didn't put in salt instead of sugar." "Bertram, will you be still ?" cut in Cyril, testily, again.
"After all, judging from what Billy tells me," resumed Bertram, cheerfully, "what I've said won't be so important to you, for you aren't the kind that scorches soups or uses salt for sugar.

So maybe I'd better put it to you this way: if you want a new sealskin coat or an extra diamond tiara, tackle him when he plays like this!" And with a swift turn Bertram dropped himself to the piano stool and dashed into a rollicking melody that half the newsboys of Boston were whistling.
What happened next was a surprise to every one.

Bertram, very much as if he were a naughty little boy, was jerked by a wrathful brother's hand off the piano stool.

The next moment the wrathful brother himself sat at the piano, and there burst on five pairs of astonished ears a crashing dissonance which was but the prelude to music such as few of the party often heard.
Spellbound they listened while rippling runs and sonorous harmonies filled the room to overflowing, as if under the fingers of the player there were--not the keyboard of a piano--but the violins, flutes, cornets, trombones, bass viols and kettledrums of a full orchestra.
Billy, perhaps, of them all, best understood.

She knew that in those tripping melodies and crashing chords were Cyril's joy at the presence of Marie, his wrath at the flippancy of Bertram, his ecstasy at that for which the rug and curtains stood--the little woman sewing in the radiant circle of a shaded lamp.