Her nephew's words would formerly have aroused a storm of indignant protest from Miss Craven, touched in a tender spot. But now some intuition warned her to silence. She put her arm through Gillian's and left the room without attempting to expostulate.
In the drawing room she sat down to a patience table, lit a cigarette, rumpled her hair, and laid out the cards frowningly. More than ever was she convinced that in the two years he had been away some serious disaster had occurred. His whole character appeared to have undergone a change. He was totally different. The old Barry had been neither hard nor cynical, the new Barry was both. In the last few weeks she had had ample opportunity for judging. She perceived that a heavy shadow lay upon him darkening his home-coming--she had pictured it so very differently, and she sighed over the futility of anticipation. His happiness meant to her so much that she raged at her inability to help him. Until he spoke she could do nothing. And she knew that he would never speak. The nightly occupation lost its usual zest, so she shuffled the cards absently and began a fresh game.
Gillian was on the hearthrug, Houston's head in her lap. She leant against Miss Craven's chair, dreaming as she had dreamt in the old convent until the sudden lifting of the dog's head under her hands made her aware of Peters standing beside her. He looked down silently on the card table for a few moments, pointed with a nicotine-stained finger to a move Miss Craven had missed and then wandered across the room and sat down at the piano. For a while his hands moved silently over the keys, then he began to play, and his playing was exquisite. Gillian sat and marvelled. Peters and music had seemed widely apart. He had appeared so essentially a sportsman; in spite of the literary tendency that his sympathetic account of the Elizabethan Barry Craven had suggested she had associated him with rougher, more physical pursuits. He was obviously an out-door man; a gun seemed a more natural complement to his hands than the sensitive keys of a piano, his thick rather clumsy fingers manifestly incompatible with the delicate touch that was filling the room with wonderful harmony. It was a check to her cherished theory which she acknowledged reluctantly. But she forgot to theorise in the sheer joy of listening.
"Why did he not make music a career?" she whispered, under cover of some crashing chords. Miss Craven smiled at her eager face.
"Can you see Peter kow-towing to concert directors, and grimacing at an audience?" she replied, rescuing a king from her rubbish heap.