“Nevare mind him!” he said, most good-naturedly. “I shall give it you with memory alone!” He sat down, and began vaguely fingering the notes; but nothing resembling the tune came out. Then he, too, grew excited. “But what oddness! How much of singularity! That I might lose, not the words alone, but the tune also—that is quite curious, I suppose?”
We all supposed it, heartily.
“It was that sweet little boy, who found it for me,” the Count suggested. “Quite perhaps he is the thief?”
“Of course he is!” cried Lady Muriel. “Bruno! Where are you, my darling?”
But no Bruno replied: it seemed that the two children had vanished as suddenly, and as mysteriously, as the song.
“They are playing us a trick!” Lady Muriel gaily exclaimed. “This is only an ex tempore game of Hide-and-Seek! That little Bruno is an embodied Mischief!”
The suggestion was a welcome one to most of us, for some of the guests were beginning to look decidedly uneasy. A general search was set on foot with much enthusiasm: curtains were thrown back and shaken, cupboards opened, and ottomans turned over; but the number of possible hiding-places proved to be strictly limited; and the search came to an end almost as soon as it had begun.
“They must have run out, while we were wrapped up in the song,” Lady Muriel said, addressing herself to the Count, who seemed more agitated than the others; “and no doubt they’ve found their way back to the housekeeper’s room.”
“Not by this door!” was the earnest protest of a knot of two or three gentlemen, who had been grouped round the door (one of them actually leaning against it) for the last half-hour, as they declared. “This door has not been opened since the song began!”
An uncomfortable silence followed this announcement. Lady Muriel ventured no further conjectures, but quietly examined the fastenings of the windows, which opened as doors. They all proved to be well fastened, inside.