It was his back that she addressed. She saw him go, saw too her anger go
with him. The outer door had not closed before the tune of which he had
spoken was dispersing it.
But was it a tune? It seemed something far rarer. In it was a whisper of
waters, the lap of waves, the muffled voice of a river, which, winding
from hill to sea, was pierced by a note very high, very clear, entirely
limpid, a note that had in it the gaiety of a sunbeam, a note that
mounted in loops of light, expanding as it mounted, until, bursting into
jets of fire, it drew from the stream's deepest depths the sonority and
glare of its riches.
The ripple of it ran down the spine of this woman, who at heart was a
Hun and to whom the harmonies disclosed, not the mythical gleam of the
Rheingold, but the real radiance of the Paliser wealth.
At the glow of it she rubbed her hands.