'What's this dull town to me?
Robin's not here—'
Like this it goes."
This time she did not use the lute but put it down carefully and folded her hands quietly together. Her own repose made it easy for her listeners to rest until the last questioning trill had died away. The applause was louder this time. Some of them were talking delightedly and the rising murmur of their approval warmed her trembling heart.
"Another! Another!" called her excitable bald friend.
"It's vairee good of you to like them. Do you think you'd enjoy a French one now? That is if it isn't ten minutes. They told me to do this for ten minutes—"
The intimate way she took them into her thoughts made even the most sceptical of them lean back and smile. If they felt like questioning the genuineness of her feeling it could only be explained on the ground of consummate art and either way it was something they didn't want to lose.
"Margot taught me this one. It is about a forest. I heard it first vairee early in the morning, the first morning I evaire did see a forest. Pretend you can see it. It was spring before the leaves had come but the tops of the trees were swaying and the branches had the colors you see when you dream—and the wind was warm and sweet and sighing. And on a maple tree a blackbird whistled—so—and in the shining melted snow-pools the little green frogs made this kind of noises—and down in the old stone stable two little new lambs were crying—it was a wonderful spring! You must pretend you can see Margot sitting in a gray stone doorway sorting seed in a little broken brown basket. Margot is ra-ther brown herself, but she has gray hair and black eyes and she's fat and she wears a blue dress, vairee old and clean and faded and a big white apron. Her voice isn't pretty I'm afraid, but her song is. Her song is the oldest song I've evaire heard. There was a Frenchman, Maitre Guerdon, who made it a long time ago. He was a fine gentleman with ruffles of lace on his sleeves and he had a lute—perhaps like this—" she picked up hers again "and what he says in his song is that he wants every shepherdess to hasten to pleasure and to be vairee careful about time for Youth alone has time to have fun with. Because, as he tells them, time slips through your fingers like water and then you have nothing left but a sorry old sad feeling. So the best thing that you and the shepherdesses can do is to run around in the spring forests and spend all the time you can—" her voice faltered "—loving—"
The absurdity of the thing never struck them. Most of them couldn't have endured a forest ten minutes. But she had them completely under her spell and it suddenly seemed the most fascinating thing in this world to be young and "—run around in a spring forest—loving—"
Her melody began. It matched the dainty spirit of the words and I think if Maitre Guedron, in that heaven where all music makers, good men or bad, should go, could have heard her, he would have bowed his admiration just to hear the tender graceful spirit that her softly muted whistle gave his quaint old song. It was a spirit never lagging, that tripped ahead of the faint strum of the lute strings.
The plaudits were coming whole-heartedly now. Felicia adored them for liking her—she leaned forward to catch what a man in the side box was saying. Bolder than the rest, he coughed and let his desire overcome his temerity as he cried out,