olour ordinarily,
but to-night the fine pale brown of her face was tinged with rose. Her
eyes were lustrous. As she spoke she drew her hands across the strings,
and there followed a sound, faint, far, and sweet. Cary wondered. He was
not a vain man, nor over-sanguine, but he wondered, "Is the brightness
for me?" The colour came into his own cheek, and a vigour touched him
from head to heel. "I don't care what you sing!" he said. "Your songs
are all the sweetest ever written. Sing To Althea!"

She sang. Rand watched her from the distance--the hands and the white
arm seen behind the gold strings, the slender figure in a gown of filmy
white, the warm, bare throat pouring melody, the face that showed the
soul within. All the room watched her as she sang,--

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage."

Through the window came the sound of rain, the smell of wet box and of
damask roses. Now and then the lightning flashed, showing the garden and
the white bloom of locust trees.

"Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage."

Rand's heart ached with passionate longing, passionate admiration. He
thought that the voice to which he listened, the voice that brooded and
dreamed, for all that it was so angel-sweet, would reach him past all
the iron bars of time or of eternity. He thought that when he came to
die he would wish to die listening to it. The voice sang to him like an
angel voice singing to Ishmael in the wilderness.

The song came to an end, but after a moment Jacqueline sang again,
sonorous and passionate words of a lover to his mistress. It was not now
the Cavalier hymning of constancy; it was the Elizabethan breathing
passion, and his cry was the more potent.

"The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine"--

Blinding lightning, followed by a tremendous crash, startled the singer
from her harp and brought all in the room to their feet. "That struck!"
exclaimed the Colonel. "Look out, Fairfax, and see if 't was the
stables! I hear the dogs howling.

"'Twas the big pine by the gate, I think, sir," answered Fairfax Cary,
half in and half out of the window. "Gad! it is black!"

"You two cannot go home to-night," cried Colonel Churchill, with
satisfaction. "And here's Cato with the decanters! We might have a hand
at Loo--eh, Unity? you and Fairfax, Ned Hunter and I.--The