But as soon as they entered the room he
had snatched it away and hidden it in a corner. He was afraid, no doubt,
of letting them suppose that he was glad to see them only because it gave
him a chance of playing them some of his compositions. And every time that
my mother, in the course of her visit, had returned to the subject of his
playing, he had hurriedly protested: "I cannot think who put that on the
piano; it is not the proper place for it at all," and had turned the
conversation aside to other topics, simply because those were of less
interest to himself.
His one and only passion was for his daughter, and she, with her somewhat
boyish appearance, looked so robust that it was hard to restrain a smile
when one saw the precautions her father used to take for her health, with
spare shawls always in readiness to wrap around her shoulders. My
grandmother had drawn our attention to the gentle, delicate, almost timid
expression which might often be caught flitting across the face, dusted
all over with freckles, of this otherwise stolid child. When she had
spoken, she would at once take her own words in the sense in which her
audience must have heard them, she would be alarmed at the possibility of
a misunderstanding, and one would see, in clear outline, as though in a
transparency, beneath the mannish face of the 'good sort' that she was,
the finer features of a young woman in tears.
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