or his particular benefit.

She was singing one of the Neapolitan folk-songs which one hears along
the shores of the Mediterranean beyond Marseilles--a love song.

Most people know that particular love-song. Lady Bridget gave it with
all the tricks and all the verve and whimsical audacity of a born
Italian singer. Well, she was Italian--on one side at least, and had
inherited the tricks and a certain quality of voice, irresistibly
catching. And she looked captivating as she sang--the small pointed
face within its frame of reddish-brown hair, the strange eyes, the
expressive red lips, alive with coquetry. The men--even the old
politicians, listened and stared, quite fascinated.

Some of the Leichardt's Town ladies--good, homely wives and mothers
who, in their early married days of struggle, had toiled and cooked and
sewed, with no time to imagine an aspect of the Eternal Feminine of
which they had never had any experience, were perhaps a little shocked,
perhaps a little regretful. One or two others, younger, with budding
aspirations, but provincial in their ideals, were filled with wonder
and vague envy.

A few of them had made the usual trip 'Home,' landing at Naples and
journeying to London, via Monte Carlo and Paris, and these felt they
had missed something in that journey which Lady Bridget was now
revealing to them. Joan Gildea, whose profession it was to realise
vividly such modes of life as came within her purview, felt herself
once more in the blue lands girdling the Sea of Story--It all came back
upon her--moonlight nights in Naples; on the Chiaja; looking down from
her windows on sunny gardens on the Riviera, and the strolling
minstrels in front of the hotel....

As for Colin McKeith who had never been in the Blue Land and knew
little even of the British Isles except for London--chiefly around St
Paul's School, Hammersmith--and the Scotch Manse where he had
occasionally spent his holidays--even he was transported from the
Government House drawing-room. Where? .... Not to the realm of visions
such as he had seen in the smoke of his camp fire. Oh no. He had never
dreamed of this kind of enchantment.

A fresh impulse seized the singer. She struck a few chords. A familiar
lilt sounded. Her face and manner changed. She burst into the famous
song of CARMEN. She WAS CARMEN. One could almost see the swaying form,
the seductive flirt of fan. There could be no doubt that had the voice
been more powerful, Lady Brid