"I? Oh, I shall be busy," he said. "I've got a lot on hand just now.

Besides," again the gibing note was in his voice, "you'll get along much better without me. Avery says so."

"She didn't!" exclaimed Jeanie, with a sudden rare touch of indignation.

"All right. She didn't," laughed Piers. "My mistake!" He flicked the child's cheek teasingly, and then abruptly stooped and kissed it. "Don't be angry, Queen of the fairies! It isn't worth it."

She slipped her arm round his neck on the instant. "I'm not, dear Piers.

I'm not angry. But we shouldn't want to go away and leave you alone. We shouldn't really."

He laughed again, carelessly, without effort. "No, but you'd get on all right without me. You and Avery are such pals. What do you say to it, Avery? Isn't it a good idea?"

"I think perhaps it is," she said slowly, her voice very low.

He straightened himself, and looked at her, and again that vivid, painful blush covered her face and neck as though a flame had scorched her. She did not meet his eyes.

"Very well then. It's settled," he said jauntily. "Now let's go and have some dinner!"

He kept up his light att.i.tude throughout the meal, save that once he raised his wine-gla.s.s mockingly to the woman on the wall. But his mood was elusive. Avery felt it. It was as if he played a juggling game on the edge of the pit of destruction, and she watched him with a leaden heart.

She rose from the table earlier than usual, for the atmosphere of the dining-room oppressed her almost unbearably. It was a night of heavy stillness.

"You ought to go to bed, dear," she said to Jeanie.

"Oh, must I?" said Jeanie wistfully. "I never sleep much on these hot nights. One can't breath so well lying down."

Avery looked at her with quick anxiety, but she had turned to Piers and was leaning against him with a gentle coaxing air.

"Please, dear Piers, would it tire you to play to us?" she begged.

He looked down at her for a moment as if he would refuse; then very gently he laid his hand on her head, pressing back the heavy, cl.u.s.tering hair from her forehead to look into her soft eyes.

"What do you want me to play?" he said.

She made a wide gesture of the hands and let them fall. "Something big,"

she said. "Something to take to bed with us and give us happy dreams."

His lips--those mobile, sensitive lips--curved in a smile that made Avery avert her eyes with a sudden hot pang. He released Jeanie, and turned away to the door.

"I'll see what I can do," he said. "You had better go into the garden--you and Avery."

They went, though Jeanie looked as if she would have preferred to accompany him to the music-room. It was little cooler on the terrace than in the house. The heat brooded over all, dense, black, threatening.

"I hope it will rain soon," said Jeanie, drawing her chair close to Avery's.

"There will be a storm when it does," Avery said.

"I like storms, don't you?" said Jeanie.

Avery shook her head. "No, dear."

She was listening in tense expectancy, waiting with a dread that was almost insupportable for the music that Piers was about to make. They were close to the open French window of the music-room, but there was no light within. Piers was evidently sitting there silent in the darkness.

Her pulses were beating violently. Why did he sit so still? Why was there no sound?

A flash of lightning quivered above the tree-tops and was gone. Jeanie drew in her breath, saying no word. Avery shrank and closed her eyes. She could hear her heart beating audibly, like the throbbing of a distant drum. The suspense was terrible.

There came from far away the growl and mutter of the rising storm. The leaves of the garden began to tremble. And then, ere that roll of distant thunder had died away, another sound came through the darkness--a sound that was almost terrifying in its suddenness, and the grand piano began to speak.

What music it uttered, Avery knew not. It was such as she had never heard before. It was unearthly, it was devilish, a fiendish chorus that was like the laughter of a thousand demons--a pandemonium that shocked her unutterably.

Just as once he had drawn aside for her the veil that shrouded the Holy Place, so now he rent open the gates of h.e.l.l and showed her the horrors of the prison-house, forcing her to look upon them, forcing her to understand.

She clung to Jeanie's hand in nightmare fear. The anguish of the revelation was almost unendurable. She felt as if he had caught her quivering soul and was thrusting it into an inferno from which it could never rise again. Through and above that awful laughter she seemed to hear the crackling of the flames, to feel the blistering heat that had consumed so many, to see the red glare of the furnace gaping wide before her.

She cried out without knowing it, and covered her face. "O G.o.d," she prayed wildly, "save us from this! Save us! Save us!"

The man at the piano could not have heard her cry. Of that she was certain. But their souls were in more subtle communion than any established by bodily word or touch. He must have known, have fathomed her anguish. For quite suddenly, as if a restraining hand had been laid upon him, he checked that dread torrent of sound. A few bitter chords, a few stray notes that somehow spoke to her of a spirit escaped and wandering alone and naked in a desert of indescribable emptiness, and then silence--a crushing, fearful silence like the ashes of a burnt-out fire.

"And in h.e.l.l he lift up his eyes." ... Why did those words flash through her brain as though a voice had uttered them? She bowed her head lower, lower, barely conscious of Jeanie's enfolding arms. She was as one in the presence of a vision, hearing words that were spoken to her alone.

"And in h.e.l.l he lift up his eyes, being in torments...."

She waited quivering. Surely there was more to come. She listened for it even while she shrank in every nerve.

It came at length slowly, heavily, like a death-sentence uttered within her. "Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pa.s.s from hence to you cannot; neither can they pa.s.s to us, that would come from thence."

The words were spoken, the vision pa.s.sed. Avery sat huddled in her chair as one stricken to the earth, rapt in a trance of dread foreboding from which Jeanie was powerless to rouse her.

The lightning flashed again, and the thunder crashed above them like the clanging of brazen gates. From the room behind them came the sound of a man's laugh, but it was a laugh that chilled her to the soul.

Again there came the sound of the piano,--a tremendous chord, then a slow-swelling volume of harmony, a m.u.f.fled burst of music like the coming of a great procession still far away.

Avery sprang upright as one galvanized into action by an electric force.

"I cannot bear it!" she cried aloud, "I cannot bear it!"

She almost thrust Jeanie from her. "Oh, go, child, go! Tell him--tell him--" Her voice broke, went into a gasping utterance more painful than speech, finally dropped into hysterical sobbing.

Jeanie sprang into the dark room with a cry of, "Piers, oh, Piers!"--and the music stopped, went out utterly as flame extinguished in water.

"What's the matter?" said Piers.

His voice sounded oddly defiant, almost savage. But Jeanie was too precipitate to notice it.

"Oh, please, will you go to Avery?" she begged breathlessly. "I think she is frightened at the storm."

Piers left the piano with a single, lithe movement that carried him to the window in a second. He pa.s.sed Jeanie and was out on the terrace almost in one bound.

He discerned Avery on the instant, as she discerned him. A vivid flash of lightning lit them both, lit the whole scene, turned the night into sudden, glaring day. Before the thunder crashed above them he had caught her to him. They stood locked in the darkness while the great reverberations rolled over their heads, and as he held her he felt the wild beating of her heart against his own.