"Agnes singing!... Oh no!..." cried Lucy; "that is quite impossible, I assure you."
"And what says the young lady herself?" replied Colonel Hubert, as Agnes came forward to meet her friends.
But she was assailed with such a clamorous chorus of questions, that it was some time before she in the least understood what had happened. To the reiterated.... "Have you really been singing, Agnes?..." "Do you really sing?..." "How is it possible we never found it out?..." and the like; she answered quietly enough, ... "I sing a little, and I have been trying to amuse myself while waiting for you." But when Mrs. Peters laughingly added, "And do you know, my dear, that Colonel Hubert has been listening to you from the back drawing-room all the time?" all semblance of composure vanished. She first coloured violently, and then turned deadly pale; and, totally unable to answer, sat down on the nearest chair instinctively, to prevent herself from falling, but with little or no consciousness of what she was about.
Colonel Hubert watched her with an eye which seemed bent upon reading every secret of the heart that so involuntarily betrayed its own agitation; but what he saw, or thought he saw there, seemed infectious, for he, too, lost all presence of mind; and quickly approaching her with heightened colour, and a voice trembling from irrepressible feeling, he said,—
"Have I offended you?... Forgive me, oh! forgive me!"
There was a world of eloquence in the look with which she met his eyes; innocent, unpractised, unconscious as it was, it raised a tumult in the noble soldier's breast which it cost many a day's hard struggle afterwards to bring to order. But nobody saw it—nobody guessed it. The whole bevy of kind-hearted ladies were filled, from the "crown to the toe," with the hope and belief that Frederick Stephenson and Agnes Willoughby were born for each other, and they explained all the agitation they now witnessed by saying,—
"Did any one ever see so shy a creature!"—"How foolish you are to be frightened about it, Agnes;" and ... "Come, my dear child, get the better of this foolish terror; and if you can sing, let us have the pleasure of hearing you."
"That's right, mamma!" said Lucy laughing; "make her sing one song before we go down to luncheon.... It is not at all fair that Colonel Hubert should be the only person in the secret."
"Sing us a song at once—there's a dear girl!" said Mrs. Peters, seating herself upon a sofa.
"Indeed, indeed, ma'am, I cannot sing!" replied Agnes, clasping her hands as if begging for her life.