“What has the World been Since?—Thee Alone!”
One of the most blissful delusions, and unaccountable withal, under which a man desperately in love invariably labours, is the profound unconsciousness of his state wherewith he credits those among whom he lives and moves. What renders the delusion all the more inexplicable is the certainty that its victim himself in his unsmitten days must have frequently spotted more than one of his friends labouring under the ravages of the intoxicating malady, or at any rate his feminine kinsfolk and acquaintance were not slow to make the discovery for him. Yet when his own turn comes he may, with absolute certainty, be counted upon to imagine that his own incoherencies of speech and action, in short, all the symptoms of acute delirium entirely escape the multifold optics of the Argus feminine; and that his Beeret remains all his own, so effectually has he guarded it. Which thing, by the way, no man ever succeeded in accomplishing yet.
Lilian was singing; a sweet pathetic ballad, rendered with infinite feeling. The song ended; a final chord or two; and the singer threw it aside and turned away from the piano.
“Thanks, Lilian. Why, my child, you sing like an angel,” said her hostess, moved almost to tears by the full, rich voice which, keeping well within its compass, fills the room just so much as it will bear and no more, while every word is as distinctly enunciated as though the singer were reciting it. Even Mr Brathwaite had forgotten to fall into his post-coenal doze, and sat upright in his arm-chair, wide awake and listening.
The three above mentioned are alone in the room this evening—yet stay—there enters a fourth. He had been standing quietly in the doorway during the song, and refrained from entering, for fear of disturbing the singer. He had been obliged to go out after supper to give some orders to Xuvani about the morrow, and returning, was surprised and entranced by the sound of Lilian’s voice in song. So he stood in the doorway, drinking in every note.
“Why, you vowed you never sang,” he exclaimed, reproachfully, advancing to the piano. “And then you wait until a fellow is out of the way, and this is the result.”
She turned to him with the most bewitching of smiles. “Well, I don’t,” she replied, in a deprecatory tone. “At least, I haven’t for a long, long time, and now I’m only trying over something I picked up the other day. Just by ourselves, you know.”
“Having carefully waited till I was out of the room.”
“Perhaps I was just a little bit shy, from being so long out of practice,” answered she, with a glance that would have melted a stone.
But her auditor, though stony enough in all other respects, was wax in her hands, and her glance thrilled through him like an electric shock. She had penetrated the one weak joint in his armour most thoroughly. Did she know it?