They started off a little after five o’clock and soon reached the woods across the high road. The declining sun shone through the branches on which the delicate foliage was not yet fully out. The grass under their feet was starred with the tiny blue forget-me-nots, and Angela knew where to find the trailing arbutus.
Isabey, whose association with women had been almost wholly French, was secretly astonished at a young girl standing upon such a footing with men. Neither Lyddon nor Richard addressed much conversation to her, and that always half-joking, but it was plain to see that she had a part in their companionship and understood well what they were talking about.
They spoke of books, and Angela was evidently familiar with those which were meat and drink to Richard and Lyddon. Isabey was not so good a classical scholar as either of the other two men, but in modern French literature and in the Romance languages he was far superior to either.
“Do you remember,” asked Richard, “the craze you had for Alfred de Musset, Gustav Nadaud, and those other delicious rapscallions of their time?”
“Certainly I do,” answered Isabey.
“And can you spout them as you did when we lived together in the Latin quarter?”
“Rather more, I think,” answered Isabey. “The better I know those rapscallion poets, as you call them, the more I like the fellows.”
“Then give us some of them, such as you used to do in the old days, when I would have to collar you and choke you in order to make you leave off.”
They were standing in a little open glade, across which a great ash tree had fallen prone and dead. Isabey, half-sitting upon the tree trunk, began with his favorite Alfred de Musset. His voice and enunciation were admirable, and his French as superior in tone to Lyddon’s as the French of Paris is superior to that of Stratford-le-bow.
If the spell of Isabey’s singing enchanted Angela, so even in a greater degree did his repetition of these latter-day poets, who, leaving the simple external things, tune their lutes to the music of the soul, a music always touched with melancholy and ever finding an echo in every heart.