“You see there are two roads here; one goes directly to our house, while the upper one passes close to the gate of the Alamares. I can take the upper road if you would like to hear the music.”
“I would, indeed, unless it might seem intrusive.”
“They are too kind hearted to think that, besides, I have a message of Doña Elvira to deliver,” he said, guiding his horses to the left, slowly climbing the hill to approach the gate silently. The phæton stood in the penumbra between the lights of two windows, and it had not been heard. The singing had ceased, the prelude of a Spanish song was begun and interrupted. The lady at the piano arose and selected another piece of music, and began the accompaniment of the old and well known “Don't you Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?”
“Who is that lady?” asked Alice in a whisper.
“She is Miss Mercedes,” whispered Clarence, glad of the excuse to whisper, and with a preparatory checking of breath and swallowing of something that seemed to fill his throat always, when her name was mentioned.
“I hope she will sing,” said Alice.
“Perhaps,” was the laconic reply, and both waited in silence. Clarence could distinctly hear his heart throbs.
A man's voice, a fine tenor, began the song. He sang the first stanza so correctly and with so much feeling that it seemed to Clarence that he could not have listened to the simple melody before now attentively enough to appreciate its pathos, for it sounded most sweetly touching to him. Only one verse was sung.
“I never thought that song capable of so much expression, or Tano capable of giving it so well.”
The reason why Victoriano interrupted this song was because Mercedes had said, “Sing something else, Tano, that song is too sad. It will give me the blues.”