Here two or three wailing notes from down-stairs are wafted, weeping into the room, setting the hearers' teeth on edge. To even an incorrect ear it might occur that Mr. Boer's stentorian notes are not always in tune!
"My dear, my dear," exclaims Lady Chetwoode, in a voice of agony, "shut the door close; closer, my dear Cyril, they are at it again!"
"It's a disease," says Cyril, solemnly. "A great many curates have it. We should count ourselves lucky that laymen don't usually catch it."
"I really think it is. I can't bear that sort of young man myself," says Lady Chetwoode, regretfully, who feels some gentle grief that she cannot bring herself to admire Mr. Boer; "but I am sure we should all make allowances; none of us are perfect; and Mrs. Boileau assures me he is very earnest and extremely zealous. Still, I wish he could try to speak differently: I think his mother very much to blame for bringing him up with such a voice."
"She was much to blame for bringing him up at all. He should have been strangled at his birth!" Cyril says this slowly, moodily, with every appearance of really meaning what he says. He is, however, unaware of the blood-thirsty expression he has assumed, as though in support of his words, being in fact miles away in thought from Mr. Boer and his Gregorian music. He is secretly rehearsing a coming conversation with his mother, in which Cecilia's name is to be delicately introduced.
"That is going rather far, is it not?" Lady Chetwoode says, laughing.
"A man is not an automaton. He cannot always successfully stifle his feelings," says Cyril, still more moodily, àpropos of his own thoughts; which second most uncalled-for remark induces his mother to examine him closely.
"There is something on your mind," she says, gently. "You are not now thinking of either me or Mr. Boer. Sit down, dear boy, and tell me all about it."
"I will tell you standing," says Cyril, who feels it would be taking advantage of her ignorance to accept a chair until his disclosure is made. Then the private rehearsal becomes public, and presently Lady Chetwoode knows all about his "infatuation," as she terms it, for the widow, and is quite as much distressed about it as even he had expected.