n be after years of
wedlock.

Patrick was asked to sing. Miss Mattock accompanied him at the piano.
Then he took her place on the music-stool, and she sang, and with an
electrifying splendour of tone and style.

'But it's the very heart of an Italian you sing with!' he cried.

'It will surprise you perhaps to hear that I prefer German music,' said
she.

'But where--who had the honour of boasting you his pupil?'

She mentioned a famous master. Patrick had heard of him in Paris. He
begged for another song and she complied, accepting the one he selected
as the favourite of his brother Philip's, though she said: 'That one?'
with a superior air. It was a mellifluous love-song from a popular
Opera somewhat out of date. 'Well, it's in Italian!' she summed up her
impressions of the sickly words while scanning them for delivery.
She had no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer,
she confessed, yet she sang as if possessed by him. Had she, Patrick
thought, been bent upon charming Philip, she could not have thrown more
fire into the notes. And when she had done, after thrilling the room,
there was a gesture in her dismissal of the leaves displaying critical
loftiness. Patrick noticed it and said, with the thrill of her voice
lingering in him: 'What is it you do like? I should so like to know.'

She was answering when Captain Con came up to the piano and remarked in
an undertone to Patrick: 'How is it you hit on the song Adiante Adister
used to sing?'

Miss Mattock glanced at Philip. He had applauded her mechanically, and
it was not that circumstance which caused the second rush of scarlet
over her face. This time she could track it definitely to its origin.
A lover's favourite song is one that has been sung by his love. She
detected herself now in the full apprehension of the fact before she
had sung a bar: it had been a very dim fancy: and she denounced herself
guilty of the knowledge that she was giving pain by singing the stuff
fervidly, in the same breath that accused her of never feeling things
at the right moment vividly. The reminiscences of those pale intuitions
made them always affectingly vivid.

But what vanity in our emotional state in a great jarring world where we
are excused for continuing to seek our individual happiness only if
we ally it and subordinate it to the well being of our fellows! The
interjection was her customary specific for the cure of these little
tricks of her blood. Leavin