“I can sing now,” with a little, shy, wistful smile.
“Well then, sing for us while I finish Tony’s leg, and afterward I will sing for you.”
“Shall I sing, ‘Sleep, baby, sleep’?”
“Yes, anything you like.”
Lady Jane lifted her little face, flushed like a flower, but still serious and anxious, and broke into a ripple of melody so clear, so sweet, and so delicately modulated, that Mam’selle Diane clasped her hands in ecstasy. She forgot her bunch of wool, the difficulty of Tony’s breast-feathers, the impossible sealing-wax leg, and sat listening enchanted; while the old lady closed her eyes and swayed back and forth, keeping time with the dreamy rhythm of the lullaby.
“Why, my dear, you have the voice of an angel!” exclaimed Mam’selle Diane, when the child finished. “I must teach you. You must be taught. Mama, she must be taught. It would be wicked to allow such a voice to go uncultivated!”
“And what can cultivation do that nature hasn’t done?” asked the old lady querulously. “Sometimes, I think too much cultivation ruins a voice. Think of yours, Diane; think of what it was before all that drilling and training; think of what it was that night you sang at Madame La Baronne’s, when your cousin from France, the Marquis d’Hautreve, said he had never listened to such a voice!”
“It was the youth in it, mama, the youth; I was only sixteen,” and Mam’selle Diane sighed over the memory of those days.
“It was before all the freshness was cultivated out of it. You never sang so well afterward.”
“I never was as young, mama, and I never had such an audience again. You know I went back to the convent; and when I came out things had changed, and I was older, and—I had changed. I think the change was in me.”