The dancing was over at last, and the radiant company had left the room.
A long and weary night it had been for the two players, though a
stimulated interest had hindered physical exhaustion in one of them for a
while. With tingling fingers and aching arms they came out of the alcove
into the long and deserted apartment, now pervaded by a dry haze. The
lights had burnt low, and Faith and her brother were waiting by request
till the wagonette was ready to take them home, a breakfast being in
course of preparation for them meanwhile.
Christopher had crossed the room to relieve his cramped limbs, and now,
peeping through a crevice in the window curtains, he said suddenly,
'Who's for a transformation scene? Faith, look here!'
He touched the blind, up it flew, and a gorgeous scene presented itself
to her eyes. A huge inflamed sun was breasting the horizon of a wide
sheet of sea which, to her surprise and delight, the mansion overlooked.
The brilliant disc fired all the waves that lay between it and the shore
at the bottom of the grounds, where the water tossed the ruddy light from
one undulation to another in glares as large and clear as mirrors,
incessantly altering them, destroying them, and creating them again;
while further off they multiplied, thickened, and ran into one another
like struggling armies, till they met the fiery source of them all.
'O, how wonderful it is!' said Faith, putting her hand on Christopher's
arm. 'Who knew that whilst we were all shut in here with our puny
illumination such an exhibition as this was going on outside! How sorry
and mean the grand and stately room looks now!'
Christopher turned his back upon the window, and there were the hitherto
beaming candle-flames shining no more radiantly than tarnished javelin-
heads, while the snow-white lengths of wax showed themselves clammy and
cadaverous as the fingers of a corpse. The leaves and flowers which had
appeared so very green and blooming by the artificial light were now seen
to be faded and dusty. Only the gilding of the room in some degree
brought itself into keeping with the splendours outside, stray darts of
light seizing upon it and lengthening themselves out along fillet, quirk,
arris, and moulding, till wasted away.
'It seems,' said Faith, 'as if all the people who were lately so merry
here had died: we ourselves look no more than ghosts.' She turned up her
weary face to her brother's, which the incoming rays smote aslant, making
little furrows of every wrinkle thereon, and shady ravines of every
little furrow.
'You are very tired, Faith,' he said. 'Such a heavy night's work has
been almost too much for you.'
'O, I don't mind that,' said Faith. 'But I could not have played so long
by myself.'
'We filled up one another's gaps; and there were plenty of them towards
the morning; but, luckily, people don't notice those things when the
small hours draw on.'
'What troubles me most,' said Faith, 'is not that I have worked, but that
you should be so situated as to need such miserable assistance as mine.
We are poor, are we not, Kit?'
'Yes, we know a little about poverty,' he replied.