"I told Madame Vanira how sweet and silvery the tone of it is, Lance," said Lady Chandos.
And again Leone shrunk from hearing on another woman's lip the word she had once used. It was awkward, it was intolerable; it struck her all at once with a sense of shame that she had done wrong in ever allowing Lord Chandos to speak to her again. But then he had pleaded so, he had seemed so utterly miserable, so forlorn, so hopeless, she could not help it. She had done wrong in allowing Lady Marion to make friends with her; Lady Marion was her enemy by force of circumstances, and there ought not to have been even one word between them. Yet she pleaded so eagerly, it had seemed quite impossible to resist her.
She was roused from her reverie by the laughing voice of Lady Marion, over whose fair head so dark a cloud hung.
"Madame Vanira," she was saying, "ask my husband to sing with you. He has a beautiful voice, not a deep, rolling bass, as one would imagine from the dark face and tall, stalwart figure, but a rich, clear tenor, sweet and silvery as the chime of bells."
Leone remembered every tone, every note of it; they had spent long hours in singing together, and the memory of those hours shone now in the eyes that met so sadly. A sudden, keen, passionate desire to sing with him once more came over Leone. It might be rash—it was imprudent.
"Mine was always a mad love," she said to herself, with a most bitter smile. "It might be dangerous—but once more."
Just once more she would like to hear her voice float away with his. She bent over the music again—the first and foremost lay Mendelssohn's beautiful duet. "Oh, would that my love." They sang it in the summer gloamings when she had been pleased and proud to hear her wonderful voice float away over the trees and die in sweetest silence. She raised it now and looked at him.
"Will you sing this?" she asked; but her eyes did not meet his, and her face was very pale.
She did not wait for an answer, but placed the music on a stand, and then—ah, then—the two beautiful voices floated away, and the very air seemed to vibrate with the passionate, thrilling sound; the drawing-room, the magnificence of Stoneland House, the graceful presence of the fair wife, faded from them. They were together once more at the garden at River View, the green trees making shade, the deep river in the distance.
But when they had finished, Lady Chandos was standing by, her face wet with tears.