“I think she found someone who wanted to talk to her.”
“Flora is still timid—very timid. I fear that Flora has let slip her chance of joining our little family group. I should have enjoyed having a daughter on either side of me, to exchange impressions.”
The first item on the heterogeneous programme, however, was provocative of no very eloquent exchange of impressions between Canon Morchard and anyone else.
He listened with a faint air of surprise to an opening chorus from a row of Pierrots and Pierrettes, interspersed with various noises from a whistle, a comb, a pair of castanets, and a small and solid poker banged loudly and intermittently against a tin tray.
At the close of it he only said:
“I hardly recognized our dear lad, at first. That was he, was it not, at the end of the row, next to the little lady with black hair?”
“Yes. The girl was Olga Duffle. I believe she sings a great deal.”
The literal truth of her own description was borne in upon Lucilla as the evening went on. Miss Duffle did sing a great deal.
She sang a solo about the Moon, and another one about a Coal-black Baby Rose, and a third one, very short and modern and rather indeterminate, asking where was now the Flow’r, that had died within an Hour, and ending on the still more poignant enquiry, addressed to le Bon Dieu Above, Where was one who said “I love”?
The Canon, to this item, only asked in a puzzled way if the end was not rather abrupt?