“I am afraid not.” And she glanced significantly towards Mary, and Dr. Stapleton, who had been the first to join her, and who had gone at once to turn over the leaves of the music-book. “You know, Tom, we are all committed to the task of securing the greatest happiness for the greatest number; and whoever makes herself and one other individual happy is doing something towards it.”
“Margaret, you are getting most disgracefully frivolous. I shall move to the piano. I am in danger here of being corrupted.”
Mary had left the instrument, and some one was asking, “Will not Miss Whitwell sing for us?”
“Miss Whitwell is not at all in a singing mood,” she said; but John Dallington added his request, and she was too good-natured to refuse. At first she played a sonata, then a march; but “A song! a song!” cried her friends, and she gave them a ditty of her own:
“There was, among the fields of earth,
A little patch of ground,
Which loving hearts held priceless,
And tender hands hedged round,—
A small brown patch, with naught to show,
Save a weed here and there;