"He can tell us."

"At his old occupation," answered a gentleman from beside Mrs.
Laudersdale, "flirting with forbidden fruit."

"An alliterative amusement," said Mrs. Laudersdale.

"You did not know the original Raleigh?" continued the gentleman. "But
he always took pleasure in female society; yet, singularly enough,
though fastidious in choice, it was only upon the married ladies that he
bestowed his platonisms. I observe the old Adam still clings to him."

"He probably found more liberty with them," remarked Mrs. Laudersdale,
when no one else replied.

"Without doubt he took it."

"I mean, that, where attentions are known to intend nothing, one is not
obliged to measure them, or to calculate upon effects."

"Of the latter no one can accuse Mr. Raleigh!" said Mr. Laudersdale,
hotly, forgetting himself for once.

Mrs. Laudersdale lifted her large eyes and laid them on her husband's
face.

"Excuse me! excuse me!" said the gentleman, with natural misconception.
"I was not aware that he was a friend of yours." And taking a lady on
his arm, he withdrew.

"Nor is he!" said Mr. Laudersdale, in lowest tones, replying to his
wife's gaze, and for the first time intimating his feeling. "Never,
never, can I repair the ruin he has made me!"

Mrs. Laudersdale rose and stretched out her arm, blindly.

"The room is quite dark," she murmured; "the flowers must soil the air.
Will you take me up-stairs?"

Meanwhile, the unconscious object of their remark was turning over a
pile of pages with one hand, while the other trifled along the gleaming
keys.

"Here it is," said he, drawing one from the others, and arranging it
before him,--a _gondel-lied_.

There stole from his fingers the soft, slow sound of lapsing waters, the
rocking on the tide, the long sway of some idle weed. Here a jet of tune
was flung out from a distant bark, here a high octave flashed like a
passing torch through night-shadows, and lofty arching darkness told in
clustering chords. Now the boat fled through melancholy narrow ways of
pillared pomp and stately beauty, now floated off on the wide lagoons
alone with the stars and sea. Into this broke the passion of the gliding
lovers, deep and strong, giving a soul to the whole, and fading away
again, behind its wild beating,--with the silence of lapping ripple and
dipping oar.

Mrs. Purcell, standing beside the player, laid a careless arm across the
instrument, and bent her face above him like a flowe