'My golden idol!' Lance broke out in a sort of laughing coughing sob.
'At least, you have the comfort of knowing you never prostituted it to any ungodly purpose,' said Clement. 'You always treated it as His goodly gift.'
Lance made no answer. Perhaps he felt at that moment that his voice had been the chief thing that made his dull life pleasant to him, and that to be either dumb or an offence to his own delicate ear was a lot to which he could hardly resign himself. Clement went to the piano, and softly sung 'Angels brightly shine forth.'
Angela came into the room with a light as he ended; Lance started up, and hastened out of the room.
He was rather worse than better for the next day or two, and shuddered with annoyance when Gertrude May's wheels approached. He would not, however, vex Cherry by shirking the early dinner, where Gertrude, a bright mixture of blue merino and swans' down, was making fun of her precise brother Tom's inclination to escort her on this her first solitary journey, when she knew it was only 'because of his friend at Ewmouth, who is equally crazy about microscopes and such unpleasant things.'
'As microscopes?' said Felix.
'That depends on what you look at. Now Tom is making perquisitions into the germs of all kinds of diseases and infections, and is never so happy as when he gets an excuse for driving over to Ewmouth.'
'Is there anything so scientific there?'
'Mr. Elsted, the chemist. He was a fellow-student of Tom's, but he hasn't nerve enough to practise; so he is a kind of stickit doctor, though he has science at his fingers' ends—the right place for a chemist, you'll say—so very sensibly he took to that line.'
'We must make friends with him,' said Felix.