‘And greater age; and you are right to be on the self-denying side for the present. But ask yourself what an old buffer like myself can do with his evenings more profitably. My eyes—not so good as they were thirty years since—have generally had a fair day’s work before dinner-time. Cards, talk, and a moderate smoke make up an old man’s evening. When I look at the sea here—and she always was a good friend to me—hear Antonia sing and play—bless her heart! and smoke a very good cigar, it is rather a cunningly mixed enjoyment, you must own. Now she’s off!’
The last statement was made simultaneously with the first notes of a song which floated out through the opened French windows, and proved to Mr. Neuchamp—a fair connoisseur—that his hostess had a fresh, true, soprano voice, and rather unusual execution. As he sat listening to song after song which Miss Frankston bestowed upon them with an utter absence of apologetic affectation, as the stars burned more brightly in the cloudless southern sky, as the wavelets kept their rhythmical murmurous monotone, he involuntarily asked himself if he had left all the social luxuries in the other hemisphere.
‘This is pleasant,’ said the merchant, after a long silence of words, with something between a sigh and a shake; ‘but there are such things as breakfast and business for to-morrow. We must end the concert. Make for that small table in the corner.’
Upon the piece of furniture referred to there stood a silver-encrusted inviting spirit-stand, with a bottle of iced Marco-brünner.
‘You must allow me to thank you for your songs, Miss Frankston,’ said Ernest; ‘whether the surroundings completed the witchery I cannot tell, but I have rarely enjoyed music so much.’
‘I am glad you like my singing,’ said she simply; ‘we see so few people that I am not always sure whether my old music-master and myself extract the correct expression in much of our practice.’
‘I can assure you of the correctness of your rendering,’ promptly assented the stranger-critic. ‘I heard the last song you were good enough to favour us with sung the week before I left. It had just been published. And I certainly prefer a slight emendation, which I think you have made.’
‘Most satisfactory!’ said she, with a mock inclination of respect; ‘and now good-night. Papa and breakfast wait for no man.’