'I'm a fool. Rather lead a forlorn hope!'
And then he raps at the door with a desperate audacity, with the air of a man who had nerved himself to something heroic.
The door swung back on its hinges, and the tall brunette, with the proud melancholy face, she who was like to the dead Marguerite, stood before him. She did not know him at first, so completely had love and the new suit of clothes transformed him.
'Good-morning, ma'amselle; how is grandfather?'
Old Chauvin, who was seated in his armchair beside Berthe at the piano, rose at the sound of the voice, and, advancing to the door, grasped him by both hands and drew him into the middle of the room.
'Welcome, welcome, my Irish friend; I was afraid you had forgotten us. I was with Monsieur O'Hara, and he did not know your address, or I would have called on you in person to render you my thanks for your present to my little Song-bird. See, she was practising one of your plaintive airs as you entered. What a world of sadness is in your Irish music! It is like the sighing of the wind through a lonely forest in the night-time.'
The O'Hoolohan Roe approached the piano. A richly-bound volume of Gaelic music, a harp rising in golden relief from its ground of green on the cover, lay before Berthe. The page at which it was open was headed, in illuminated letters, Eiblin-a-ruin. The white neck of the maiden suffused with a delicate pink, such a pink as we see sometimes colouring the sea-shell, at the undisguised glance of admiration of the Irishman. She tossed up her pretty head, looking so classic under its canopy of chestnut hair, and regarded him with frank eyes as he began to speak. It was too much for the O'Hoolohan Roe; he was not proof against woman's gaze; he got embarrassed, stuttered in the middle of some phrase of congratulation about the correctness of her taste, and finally fell back hors de combat. To add to his confusion, there was a traitorous crash as he flopped down in a chair—the hand-mirror in his back-pocket was broken! She followed him with an arch, wicked smile; her brown eyes wilfully sparkled, and a line of ivory showed itself between the cherry bordering of her lips.
It was a critical moment. But the esprit Français is not wanting in ingenuity. It is equal to every occasion.
'Shall I play this beautiful air for our kind friend, grandfather? It is a poor way to show my gratitude, but it is the best and only way I have.'
The O'Hoolohan Roe opened a sentence which, we dare say, might have been very eloquent had it been completed, but unluckily a severe fit of coughing arrested him mid-way, and necessitated the production of the perfumed handkerchief.