She leaned forward holding out his cup which he was just able to reach. As they drank, the rooms beside them were lit up, the curtains parted, and bands of light streamed over the verandah.
Valerie tried to forget the man who lay in the hammock looking at her. She forced herself to ask questions about the things she had heard he had willed to the Sydney Museum, tried to still the rather sickening pounding of her heart. When they had finished he got out of the hammock and led her into the study where the fire had just been lit. She looked round the room knowing it was just as beautiful as she had expected it to be. It did something to her, exactly what she could not have told. Everything in it began to run together.
“Will you play to me now, dear?” he asked.
“Oh, I—I couldn’t play just now.”
She felt his eyes burning upon her face. She looked up as he caught her against him.
“Then will you play to me—to-morrow?”
Her answer was given to his lips.
And then the world faded away from Valerie, and a man’s imperious face and possessive arms were all there was of substantial stuff left in a great space. And her resolutions and ambitions deserted her as if they had never been, and she stood in her imaginative house of many mansions with but one certainty, that love was all and the world well lost for it, and she consigned all other considerations to the attic to keep company with the spiders and the dust.
