After once listening to it, it was very easy to believe the weird stories of Norse sorceresses, and German wood-spirits and pixies, luring men to death with their fatally musical tones.
"Simple curiosity," Guy replied, coolly, "and a little compassion for your victims. They might be friends of mine, you know."
Miss Bellasys bit her lip, half provoked, half amused, apparently, as she answered, "The dead tell no tales."
"No, but the wounded do, and they cry out pretty loudly sometimes. I suppose all the cases did not terminate fatally. Will you confess?"
"I have nothing to tell you," Flora said, very demurely and meekly, only for once her eyes betrayed her. "Mamma took me down into Devonshire, where we have an aunt or two, for sea-breezes and seclusion. I rather liked at first having nothing on earth to do, and nothing—yes, I understand—really nothing to think about. I used to sleep a great deal, and then drive a little obstinate pony, to see views. But I don't care much about views—do you? Then mamma was always wanting me to help her look for shells and wild-flowers; and the rocks hurt my feet, and the bushes never would leave me alone in the woods." She shuddered slightly here.
"The Bushes! a Devonshire family of that name, I presume?" Guy interrupted, with intense gravity. "How wrong of them! They are very ill-regulated young men down in those parts, I believe."
"Don't be absurd; I never saw a creature for months between fifteen and fifty. Are not those ages safe?" (A shake of the head from Livingstone.) "I began to be very unhappy; I had no one to tease; my aunts are too good-natured, and mamma is used to it. At last I had the greatest mind to do something desperate—to write to you, for instance—merely to see the household's horror when your answer came. You would have answered, would you not? I should not have opened it, you know, but given it to mamma, like a good child."
"Of course; I know you show all your letters to your mother. But that ruralizing must have been fearful for you, poverina! People were talking a good deal of agricultural distress, but this is the most piteous case I've heard of. So there were really no men to govern in that wood?"
"Not even a little boy," said Flora, decisively. "There were two or three from Oxford in the neighborhood; I used to see them sitting outside their lodgings in the sun, like rabbits, but they always ran in before—"
"Before you could get a shot at them, you mean?" broke in Guy; "you ought to have crept up, and stalked them cleverly."