When it opened, a strawberry mouth opened also. "Oh!" Cassy's blue eyes were red. There was fright in them. "It is horrible! Tell me, do you think it was he?"
Jones removed his hat. "I know it was not."
That mouth opened again, opened for breath, opened with relief. Gasping, she stared. "Thank God! I was afraid----But are you sure? It was I who told him--I thought it my fault. It was killing me. Tell me. Are you really sure?"
Jones motioned. "His lawyer is. I have just seen him."
"He is! Thank God then! Thank God! And my father! It has made him ill. He liked him so! I am going for medicine now. Will you go in and speak to him?"
She turned and called. "It is Mr. Jones--a friend of Mr. Lennox." She turned again. "I will be back in a minute."
Beyond, in the room with the piano and the painted warrior, the musician lay on a sofa, bundled in a rug. There was not much space on the sofa, yet, as Jones entered, he seemed to recede. Then, cavernously, he spoke.
"Forgive me for not rising. This business has been too much for me. Sit down."
Jones put his hat on the table and drew a chair. "I am sorry it has upset you. It amounts to nothing."
Perplexedly the musician repeated it. "Nothing?"
"Well, everything is relative. It may seem unusual to be held without bail and yet, if we all were, it would be commonplace."
The musician plucked at the rug. "I suppose everybody thinks he did it?"
"Everybody, no. I don't think so and I am sure your daughter doesn't."
Jones, who had been taking in the room, the piano, the portrait, the table, sketched a gesture.
"We are all in jail. The opinion of the world is a prison, our own ideas are another. We are doubly jailed, and very justly. We are depraved animals. We think, or think we think, and what we think others have thought for us and, as a rule, erroneously."
From a phonograph somewhere, in some adjacent den, there floated a tenor aria, the _Bella figlia del amore_, pierced suddenly and beautifully by a contralto's rich voice.
Jones turned. "That's Caruso. I don't know who the Maddelena is. Do you remember Campanini?"
"Yes, I remember him. He was a better actor than Caruso."
"And so ugly that he was good-looking. Caruso is becoming uneven."
Vaguely the musician considered the novelist. "You think so?"