'Don't be foolish, and break my heart over it! Oh! Willie, if you get angry, I can't bear it now, it is all so sad.'
The mute caress answered, but each was a little relieved to say 'Hark,' as the silence was broken by the sharp wail of Edgar's violin, which Lance was handling to ascertain in what condition it had arrived.
'Is your voice all right, Lancey?' asked Felix, as he spoke of the choral meetings.
'Just what I want to know. I've not sung to any one I could trust to tell me the sound of it. Miss Grey likes it well enough, but then she never heard it before, and I don't know whether the best high notes have not thickened.'
'What will you try? said Clement 'I'm not sure that "Chloe's disdain" did not show you off as well as any.'
'Then Angel—where is she?'
'Angel anathematises light and profane songs on the eve of the honourable sabbath,' said Bernard; 'I wish she was here to have her ears pulled.'
'No, it is not so much that,' said Cherry, 'as that she cannot bear secular music since that unlucky song. But here's Stella, the universal stop-gap, to be Chloe.'
It was a fine old seventeenth-century dialogue song, a sort of heir-loom in the family—the lady's part full of the pert coy disdain that passed for maidenliness, the swain's of a pathetic steadfast constancy, and there was a variety in the expression that had always given scope for the peculiar beauties of Lance's voice. But as he sang it now, it was not only as a musical exercise or 'crack song,' the manly melancholy stirred the depths of a sad but resolute heart that could hardly have otherwise poured itself out. So two of the hearers understood it, and Cherry, clasping Felix's hand, found the pressure returned.
It was only Clement who, as the last sweet quiver died away, was disengaged enough to say, 'You seem to me to have gained instead of lost.'