Mallory crossed the room so that, as he stood leaning with one elbow on the chimney-piece, he faced the player, on whose aureole of dusky hair one of the lights still burning cast a glimmer.
While he waited for her to begin, he was aware of a little unaccustomed thrill of excitement, as though he were on the verge of some discovery.
Hesitatingly Nan touched a chord or two.

Then without further preamble she broke into the strange, suggestive music which Penelope had described as representing the murder of a soul.

It opened joyously, the calm beginnings of a happy spirit; then came a note of warning, the first low muttering of impending woe.

Gradually the simple melody began to lose itself in a chaos of calamity, bent and swayed by wailing minor cadences through whose torrent of hurrying sound it could be heard vainly and fitfully trying to assert itself again, only to be at last weighed down, crushed out, by a cataclysm of despairing chords.
Then, after a long, pregnant pause--the culminating silence of defeat--the original melody stole out once more, repeated in a minor key, hollow and denuded.
As the music ceased the lights sprang up again and Nan, looking across the room, met Mallory's gaze intently bent upon her.

In his expression she could discern that by a queer gift of intuition he had comprehended the whole inner meaning of what she had been playing.