“It seems to me that all places are the better for it,” said she; “but perhaps that is because I am a Philistine. However, since you don’t think this a place for liveliness, suppose you sing something. It is certainly a place for music, and we have left all the musicians behind.”
They had indeed left those gondolas full of singers, which haunt the Grand Canal and hover around the hotels of Venice, far behind, and were floating in the silence of the lustrous night near San Lazare. Lennox hesitated and looked at Aimée, who turned her glance on him.
“Do you sing?” she asked.
“Sing?” repeated Fanny. “He used to sing divinely! I suppose he has not forgotten that in the desert.”
“Oh, no,” said Lennox, with a laugh. “I have floated on the Nile and sung to myself many a night.”
“Sing to us now, then, will you not?” said Aimée.
There was no insistence in her tone, only a courteous request; but he complied immediately, as he would no doubt have complied had she asked him to take a plunge into the sea. Nor did he require more than an instant to decide what he would sing. As he watched her uplifted face with the moonbeams falling on it, he had been thinking of a song of Heine’s, and the music—Schumann’s music—was in his throat, as it were; so he began at once:
“The lotus flower feareth
The splendor of the sun;
Bowing her head and dreaming,