"I thought yer didn't mane it; Romanzo said yer was laughing at me for telling yer 'bout the lords and ladies a-making love with their guitars." The voice indicated some dejection of spirits.
"He did, did he! I'll settle with Romanzo later." He heard a soft brushing of branches in the region of the Norway spruces and knew that the youth was in retreat. "And I'll settle it with you, too, Miss Aileen Armagh-and-don't-you-forget-it, in a way that'll make you remember the tag end of your name for one while!"
This threat evidently had its effect.
"Wot yer going to do?"
He heard her draw her breath sharply.
"Come down here and I'll tell you."
"I can't. She might catch me. She told me I'd got to stay in my room after eight, and she's coming home ter-night. Wot yer going to do?"
Champney laughed outright. "Don't you wish you might know, Aileen Armagh!" He took his banjo in one hand, lifted his cap with the other and, standing so, bareheaded in the moonlight, sang with all the simulated passion and pathos of which he was capable one of the few love songs that belong to the world, "Kathleen Mavoureen"; but he took pains to substitute "Aileen" for "Kathleen." Even Ann and Hannah, listening from the kitchen porch, began to feel sentimentally inclined when the clear voice rendered with tender pathos the last lines:
"Oh! why art thou silent, thou voice of my heart?
Oh! why art thou silent, Aileen Mavoureen?"
Without so much as another glance at the little figure in the window, he ran across the lawn and up the lane to the highroad.