"You sing of love almost as if you felt it, Cicely," he whispers tentatively. "Sappho could not have put more expression into her dying lay than you did just now into that 'Adieu.'"
"I like mournful music," she says, her fingers wandering silently over the keys.
"Yes; your songs always tell of death and parting and broken faith—blighted blossoms."
"'Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought.' So says the poet, Jack; and, you see, my life is so full of bright and pleasant things, so happy and commonplace, that, when I sing, I like to wander in soul among the royally afflicted."
"You are happy, Cicely?" he asks wistfully, laying his hot hand with a timid appealing touch on her straying fingers. "You want nothing in your life?"
"Nothing, Jack—nothing. What could I want more than I have?" she answers, in a mild Sunday-school tone of reproof. "Heaven has laden me with benefits; I have had few crosses."
"Well, I have not the same complaint, goodness knows!" he says, moving away sullenly.
Occasionally he meets Lady Saunderson in society, where she is now beginning to take a prominent lead, the term of her sojourn in Coventry having been summarily curtailed by the rumor that she is going to give a big ball, which brings young ladies to their senses and fills the dowagers' bosoms with Christian feelings toward the beautiful culprit; but Jack and she do not speak to each other again until one evening, riding home, his horse dead-beat after two hard runs, he hears a gay clear voice address him in the gloom—a voice that brings the blood to his face and sets his pulses throbbing.
"Is the road wide enough for you and me to walk abreast, Jack Everard?"
He looks up and sees that she has reined in at a cross-road, and is waiting to join him.