In a voice like saddest music he repeated those exquisite lines from Leigh Hunt:
"The world buds every year,
But the heart, just once, and when
The blossom falls off sere,
No new blossom comes again.
Ah! the rose goes with the wind
But the thorns remain behind!"
"Your poetry reminds me of the new songs," said she, dropping the argument. "It was very kind of you to bring them. Will you come to the piano and turn the leaves while I try them?"
"Certainly," he answered, rising and attending her.
It was the hardest thing she could have asked of him, but Lance was very unselfish. He put down the throb of pain that rose at the remembrance of the new songs he and Lily had been wont to practice at the same piano, and turned the leaves with a steady hand while her fingers flew over the keys. But one thing she had asked more than once. It was that he should sing with her. This he always quietly declined to do.
"That is rude of you," she would say, in a voice of chagrin. "Your tenor is so perfectly splendid, why should you refuse?"
"I shall never sing again," he would answer, quietly but firmly, and no persuasion on her part could induce him to change his mind.
It was agony for him to stand there and turn the leaves, looking down upon that dark head instead of the golden one he had been wont to gaze upon so fondly. When the face was lifted with a smile to his, and instead of Lily's soft, blue eyes he met the gaze of the black ones, his heart thrilled with pain. Perhaps she guessed it, but she kept him there all the same, thinking that time would blunt the keenness of his remembrance and teach him to adore the brunette as fondly as he had loved the blonde.
She played at him, she sung at him, lifting her passionate glance to his whenever some appropriate sentiment in the song seemed to warrant such expressiveness. Lance never dreamed of the reason for her pantomime. He had seen the same thing practiced by ladies in society. He deemed it a harmless kind of flirting, but never thought of responding to it.
She kept him there perhaps an hour patiently waiting on her pleasure, and passing his opinion only as it was called for on the various pieces she was practicing. At last, to his great relief, she grew weary of her amusement, and left the piano.