“I am very sorry!”
“Will you grant me one favor to make up?”
“Yes.”
“Never to sing the song to any one when I am present. I could not bear it.”
“I promise,” she answered, looking up in his face with a glance of sympathetic consciousness.
There was an acknowledged secret between them, and Walter hugged it.
“I gave you a frozen bird,” he said, “and you have warmed it, and made it soar and sing.”
“Thank you; a very pretty compliment!” she answered—and there was a moment’s silence.
“I am so glad we know each other!” she resumed. “You could help me so much if you would! Next time you come, you must tell me something about those old French rhymes that have come into fashion of late! They say a pretty thing so much more prettily for their quaint, antique, courtly liberty! The triolet now—how deliriously impertinent it is! Is it not?”
Walter knew nothing about the old French modes of versifying; and, unwilling to place himself at a disadvantage, made an evasive reply, and went. But when at length he reached home, it was with several ancient volumes, among the rest “Clement Marot,” in pockets and hands. Ere an hour was over, he was in delight with the variety of dainty modes in which, by shape and sound, a very pretty French something was carved out of nothing at all. Their fantastic surprises, the ring of their bell-like returns upon themselves, their music of triangle and cymbal, gave him quite a new pleasure. In some of them poetry seemed to approach the nearest possible to bird-song—to unconscious seeming through most conscious art, imitating the carelessness and impromptu of warblings as old as the existence of birds, and as new as every fresh individual joy; for each new generation grows its own feathers, and sings its own song, yet always the feathers of its kind, and the song of its kind.