“The name has slipped my memory. How does it run?”
Barbara leaned against the high back of her chair. She looked steadily at Stephen Gore, every fibre in her tense as the fibres of a yew bow bent by an English arm.
“‘My love has left me a chain of gold.’ That is the first line.”
My lord furrowed his forehead thoughtfully.
“Hum! go on. I catch nothing of it yet.”
“‘My love has left me a chain of gold,
With a knot of pearls, for a token.
It came from his hand when that hand was cold,
And the heart within him broken.’”
There was a short silence in the music-room, the flames of the candles swaying this way and that as though some one moving had sent a draught upon them.