There was a rather uncomfortable silence as, more and more feeling pity and sympathy for their visitor, Millicent began to turn over a volume of bound up music, while, with trembling hands, Bayle drew his quaint boxwood flute with its brass keys and ivory mounts from its case.
It was a wonderfully different instrument from one of those cocoa-wood or metal flutes of the present day, every hole of which is stopped not with the fingers but with keys. This was an old-fashioned affair, in four pieces, which had to be moistened at the joints when they were stuck together, and all this business the Reverend Christie Bayle went through mechanically, for his eyes were fixed upon the music Millicent was turning over.
“Let’s try that,” he said suddenly, in a voice tremulous with eagerness, as she turned over leaf after leaf, hesitating at two or three songs—“Robin Adair,” “Ye Banks and Braes,” and another—easy melodies, such as a flute player could be expected to get through. But though she had given him plenty of time to choose either of these, he let her turn over, and went on wetting the flute joints, and screwing them up till she arrived at “I Know a Bank.”
“But it is a duet,” she said, smiling at him as an elder sister might have smiled at a brother she wished to encourage, and who had just made another mistake.
“Yes,” he said hastily; “but I can take up first one voice and then the other, and when it comes to the duet part the piano will hide the want of the second voice.”
“Or I can play it where necessary,” said Millicent, who began to brighten up. Perhaps this was not going to be such a dismal failure after all.
“To be sure,” he said: “if you will. There, I think that will do. Pray excuse me if I seem terribly nervous,” he whispered.
“Oh! don’t apologise, Mr Bayle. We are all friends here. I do not mind. I was thinking of you.”
“Thank you,” he said hastily. “You are very kind. Shall we begin?”
“Yes, I am ready,” said Millicent, glancing involuntarily at Hallam, who was still conversing with Trampleasure, his face perfectly calm, but his eyes wearing a singular look of triumph.