Raymore could not understand why Crawleigh was interested, if indeed he was. He watched them together at one drawing-room gathering following a dinner party. Rosalind was dressed vividly, as she usually was these days, in emerald-green satin. Her hair, dressed high in intricate coils, shone and made her neck appear long and slender. She was laughing. Her dark eyes sparkled, her teeth showed very white in contrast to the darkness of her hair. Had her face been so animated when she had first arrived in his house? He seemed to remember gaining an impression of a stubborn will and perhaps a sullen nature.

His eyes slid down her body. The gown became her well. Its bright color and high sheen gave the impression of elegance, although its style was not calculated to reveal her figure. Raymore remembered those full breasts beneath his hands, the tiny waist, the flaring hips. She laughed again as he watched, a pealing, girlish laugh, and laid a hand lightly on Crawleigh's sleeve for a moment. The earl felt anger flaring. She need not set her cap so blatantly at the man. It might be a brilliant match for her if she could accomplish her goal, but he could not like the connection. He did not have a chance to analyze his feeling; his hostess claimed his attention at that point.

Rosalind's sessions in the music room had not discontinued after her come-out ball. In fact, it became almost a necessity to her to spend at least an hour a day playing and singing. Music soothed her and provided some kind of anchor to an existence that she found a great strain. Rarely was she at ease when she was in society. With Sir Bernard and Sir Henry Martel she found she could relax, but she was always aware of other people in the room and she always wondered what they thought of her, especially when she found it impossible to stay seated. But in the music room she could be herself, forget that she was not as other women. Cousin Hetty had warned her that Raymore had one of his concerts planned for later in the spring and that the artists he chose would probably use the music room for a few weeks prior to the performance. But for the time the room was hers. No one else ever used it and no one ever came there to interrupt her. She believed that no one else except Cousin Hetty and Sylvia even knew that she practiced there regularly.

Rosalind began to challenge herself. She had always played to entertain herself. But in the country she had had other activities, notably painting and riding. And riding had always been the big challenge. Because she was disabled, she had prided herself on being an accomplished and daring horsewoman. But here she had nothing but her music. She had never asked if she could ride here. She supposed that her guardian might consent; riding was an acceptable pastime for ladies. But riding in London meant walking, or at best trotting, a horse in Hyde Park. It was yet another social activity. It would offer her no freedom. She forced herself, then, to aim for greater musical achievement. She practiced for hours on the harpsichord, almost exclusively Bach music, trying to achieve the crisp brilliance that she was now convinced his music was meant to sound like.

But Beethoven had always been her greatest love. There was a passion underlying the surface intricacy of his music, she had always believed. And she had been contented to play those pieces that came easily to her. She had often played the first movement of his Piano Sonata Number 14 because it was relatively easy to play and the melody was so breathtakingly beautiful. Some poet had called it the Moonlight Sonata because the music reminded him of moonlight on Lake Lucerne. Rosalind had always tried to picture such a scene as she played, sparkling cold water, snow-capped Alpine mountains all around. But now she tackled the second and third movements too, forcing her fingers through the tricky runs, trying to achieve power and precision and passion in the chords. But for days she despaired of ever mastering the technicalities.

There was a Sevres vase in the music room, a priceless work of art, Rosalind judged, as well as a beautiful one. She frequently spent time just gazing at it and running her fingers lightly over its texture. When her frustration with Beethoven became so powerful that she felt a strong urge to stalk over and smash the vase, she would turn to song and restore her tranquillity with love songs and ballads. She chose songs for their simplicity and emotion. She was never tempted to try opera or vocal music that required more power or expertise.

Part of the charm of her times in the music room was the fact that there she was completely alone, quite free of the necessity to smile, to make polite conversation, to pretend to be enjoying herself. She would have been horrified indeed had she known that the music room exerted just as strong a pull on someone else. The Earl of Raymore despised himself for his weakness. She was, after all, only a girl dabbling in an art that was beyond her talents. But though he was from home far more than had ever been his practice in the daytime, he was drawn back there, against his every instinct, almost each afternoon when he knew that in all probability Rosalind would be singing and playing.

At first he stood outside the door listening, but his constant unease lest someone should come along and find him spying outside a room in his own house or- worse-that she would unexpectedly emerge and find him there, drove him into an adjoining salon. It was a good choice. Part of the wall between the two rooms was merely a thin paneling that could be folded back and always was during his concerts so that a supper could be laid for his guests to feast upon during the interval. He could listen in the salon almost as well as if he were right in the room with her. And it suited him very well not to see her. He tried to ignore the fact that the music that had become almost a drug to him was produced by Rosalind Dacey.

And so the Earl of Raymore discovered with Rosalind the wonder of Bach on the harpsichord, and he suffered with her through her mastery of the Moonlight Sonata. He would find himself sitting forward in the only chair that had been stripped of its holland covers, clutching his head in frustration, sometimes anger, as she repeatedly played over the same bars and repeatedly made the same mistakes. He would grip the arms of the chair, his eyes tightly closed, willing her through a passage that she had finally grasped. And he listened in a kind of agonized wonder when the melody came flowing in all its glory through the intricate runs and crashing chords.

Raymore had to admit to himself finally that Rosalind Dacey was no dabbler. She was an artist. And he always waited for her to sing. There was nothing brilliant about her vocal performances; the music was too simple to demand brilliance. But she brought a clarity of style and depth of feeling to the old songs that gave them power and dignity. He always waited in hope for the song she had sung that first time he had listened, the one about the rose. He had spent more than an hour in his library one morning trying to find the words of the song. But he had had no success. It must be something recently composed, though surely something that would last. It must be by one of the new poets. He had even gone to a bookshop and bought a copy of Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. But if one of them had written the poem, it was not in that particular volume. The song haunted him. He found himself thinking of the singer as a red rose. He could even picture her dressed in the rose-red gown that she had worn on the night of her come-out. But he steadfastly resisted putting Rosalind's face and character into the hazy mental image that he carried with him almost against his will. His rose was becoming a fantasy creature, different from women as he knew them in reality.