d away, laughing. Hortense was in a great carved
high-back chair with clumsy, wooden cupids floundering all about the
tall head-rest. Her face was alight in soft-hued crimson flaming from
an Arabian cresset stuck in sockets against the Flemish cabinet.

"A child's trick," began Hortense, catching at the shafts of light.

"I often think of those old days on the beach."

"So do I," said Hortense.

"I wish they could come back."

"So do I," smiled Hortense. Then, as if to check more: "I suppose,
Ramsay, you would want to drown us all--Ben and Jack and Rebecca and
me."

"And I suppose you would want to stand us all on our heads," I retorted.

Then we both laughed, and Hortense demanded if I had as much skill with
the lyre as with the sword. She had heard that I was much given to
chanting vain airs and wanton songs, she said.

And this is what I sang, with a heart that knocked to the notes of the
old madrigal like the precentor's tuning-fork to a meeting-house psalm:

"Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting,
Which, clad in damask mantles, deck the arbours,
And then behold your lips where sweet love harbours,
My eyes perplex me with a double doubting,
Whether the roses be your lips, or your lips the roses."

Barely had I finished when Mistress Hortense seats herself at the
spinet, and, changing the words to suit her saucy fancy, trills off
that ballad but newly writ by one of our English courtiers:

"Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because--_Rebecca's_--fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
'Cause _Rebecca's_ rosier are?"

"Hortense!" I protested.

"Be _he_ fairer than the day
Or the _June-field coils of hay_;
If _he_ be not so to me,
What care I how _fine_ he be?"

There was such merriment in the dark-lashed eyes, I defy Eli Kirke
himself to have taken offence; and so, like many another youth, I was
all too ready to be the pipe on which a dainty lady played her stops.
As the song faded to the last tinkling notes of the spinet her fingers
took to touching low, tuneless melodies like thoughts creeping into
thoughts, or perfume of flowers in the dark. The melting airs slipped
into silence, and Hortense shut her eyes, "to get the memory of it,"
she said. I thought she meant some new-fangled tune.

"This is memory enough for me," said I.

"Oh?" asked Hortense, and she uncovered all the blaze of the dark
lights hid in those eyes.

"Faith, Hortense," I answered, like