“I’m sure I don’t know. I haven’t heard of him for years and years; but the Roylands are always long-living people, so perhaps he is still alive. It is now fifty years since he went away, at the age of twenty-five, so if he is still alive he must be quite seventy-five years of age.”
“Seventy-five years of age,” repeated Crispin, and relapsed into silence.
“Who is seventy-five years of age?” asked Caliphronas, overhearing the remark.
“My Uncle Rudolph, if alive,” said Maurice lazily.
“Oh, indeed!” replied Caliphronas carelessly, but his words conveyed volumes as he tried to catch the eye of Crispin. In this, however, he was not successful, as Crispin was wrapt up in a brown study, so the Greek turned towards Eunice and asked her to sing something.
“I am passionately fond of music,” he said, turning over some songs, “and nothing so delights me as to hear a woman’s voice.”
Eunice blushed at this compliment to her sex, and, not knowing how to answer it,—for she was still afflicted with the shyness of the bread-and-butter age,—took up the first song that came to hand.
“Do you know this song?” she said, placing the music before her—“‘The Star Sirius;’ it is the new scientific style of song, now all the rage.”
“A scientific song,” repeated Caliphronas, rather puzzled.
“Yes, blending instruction with pleasure,” said Crispin, rousing himself out of his revery and walking over to the piano. “The public are tired of love-songs, sea-songs, sacred songs, comic songs, and sentimentalities of all kinds; so some ingenious person has invented the scientific song. In this song astronomy is brought to the aid of eroticism, and the result is peculiar, to say the least of it. I presume such ditties are written for musically-inclined Girton girls. Shall I play your accompaniment, Miss Dengelton?”