“Celia,” said the elder of the two, a handsome, eager-faced girl, with brown hair and eyes—“Celia, are we not lucky? Do you see what the first song is?”
“I saw it ever so long ago, but I did not tell you. I thought it would be such a surprise. I wish you hadn’t seen it till you heard it,” said the younger girl.
“What an Irishism!” returned the other, laughing. “You mustn’t count on my short-sightedness, you see;” for Winifred, the elder girl, was a trifle short-sighted. “I am very glad I saw it; I like the pleasures of anticipation.”
She did not look her age, though she was fond of impressing upon her friends that she was “no longer very young.” Her complexion and the rounded outlines of her face might have been in keeping with seventeen or eighteen. Only a certain tone of decision, a slight, very slight touch of brusqueness, made her twenty-four years credible. Late hours and heated rooms, the wear and tear of over-amusement or over-excitement, had nothing to answer for in the case of these country girls—country girls, in a sense, of the old-fashioned kind.
Celia, who was not yet twenty, was prettier than her sister; taller and fairer—a more flowerlike creature—with an entire absence of self-consciousness, born to a certain extent, perhaps, of her absolute reliance upon Winifred, which added curiously to her charm.
“So do I,” she replied. “I like to know the name of the singer and to picture her to myself beforehand—especially when she is going to sing anything one loves so clearly as,” and she mentioned the song (an old ballad which I will not name, as I should like my readers to think of the old ballad they care for most). “If she is ugly or ungraceful, I shall just shut my eyes after the first glance and try to forget her. But her name is—pretty? no, not exactly, but nice, somehow, and rather queer. ‘Hertha Norreys.’ Did you ever hear it before, Winifred?”
”‘Norreys,’ spelt like that, is a very good name,” said Winifred the all-wise, “but ‘Hertha!’ What is it I know about ‘Hertha?’ We must look it out in our ‘Christian names,’ Celia, when—”
But a touch on her arm from the quicker-eyed Celia silenced her, and like their chaperon and her friend, they grew mute, more than mute, motionless with interest which soon developed into an intenser feeling, as they watched the new-comer quietly making her way to the front of the platform. Saw her, and soon heard her. Yet the two perceptions seemed almost as one. From that first day, it was and ever remained to both—to Winifred especially, perhaps—impossible to think of Hertha Norreys in her absence except as singing, impossible to hear elsewhere the familiar notes of her favourite songs without seeing her.
For her songs, as a rule, were well known and simple; ballads familiar to most of us—the kind of thing which is, in great measure, “made” by the artist; which may be “marred” into utter nonentity.
And she was not—no, certainly not—“pretty,” and by no means “to the multitude” beautiful, though the word describes less inadequately than a poorer one the impression she made on the “some;” an impression which after knowledge of her, never lessened or effaced. She was not very tall, though of what used to be considered more than average height for a woman: nothing in or about her was startling or even striking. Her features, though in almost perfect proportion—perhaps for that very reason—never provoked admiration of their individual merits; her eyes, clear and sweet, could light up with affection or with occasionally a flash of consciousness almost approaching the inspiration of genius, into rare beauty; her whole face, her whole personality, spoke above all of simple yet powerful goodness, the true, large-hearted, thoughtful goodness of a noble woman.