Doomsday by Warwick Deeping

In the morning she heard Fream moving, but she lay very still, pretending to be asleep, until the door of his dressing-room closed.

She was conscious of a feeling of humiliation, and of pitiful bewilderment. She sat on the edge of the bed, with a vacant face, pondering upon a shameful pity that seemed to well up out of the deeps. Such pity! She could see that the sun was shining, and she went and opened the shutters, and saw the sea as blue as lapis lazuli, and felt the stir of that southern coast. Three old men, bent and black, with guitar, violin, and mandoline, struck up some Italian love-song in the garden below. They looked up at her window. One, the oldest and most bent of the three, began to sing in a harsh and metallic voice, and at the end of each stanza he broke into an absurd little shuffling dance.