"Try to sing it," said Oleron, his thumb still in the envelope; and Mrs.
Barrett, with much dimpling and confusion, hummed the air.

"They do say it was sung to a harp, Mr. Oleron, and it will be very
o-ald," she concluded.

"And _I_ was singing that?"

"Indeed you wass. I would not be likely to tell you lies."

With a "Very well--let me have breakfast," Oleron opened his letter; but
the trifling circumstance struck him as more odd than he would have
admitted to himself. The phrase he had hummed had been that which he had
associated with the falling from the tap on the evening before.


V

Even more curious than that the commonplace dripping of an ordinary
water-tap should have tallied so closely with an actually existing air
was another result it had, namely, that it awakened, or seemed to awaken,
in Oleron an abnormal sensitiveness to other noises of the old house. It
has been remarked that silence obtains its fullest and most impressive
quality when it is broken by some minute sound; and, truth to tell, the
place was never still. Perhaps the mildness of the spring air operated on
its torpid old timbers; perhaps Oleron's fires caused it to stretch its
old anatomy; and certainly a whole world of insect life bored and
burrowed in its baulks and joists. At any rate, Oleron had only to sit
quiet in his chair and to wait for a minute or two in order to become
aware of such a change in the auditory scale as comes upon a man who,