twenty strong, was not that Her voice that shot like light into the
darkest places, thrilling the walls and pillars as though they were
pieces of his heart! What time, too, Madame Dor in a corner of the high
pew, turning her back upon everybody and everything, could not fail to be
Ritualistically right at some moment of the service; like the man whom
the doctors recommended to get drunk once a month, and who, that he might
not overlook it, got drunk every day.

But, even those seraphic Sundays were surpassed by the Wednesday concerts
established for the patriarchal family. At those concerts she would sit
down to the piano and sing them, in her own tongue, songs of her own
land, songs calling from the mountain-tops to Vendale, "Rise above the
grovelling level country; come far away from the crowd; pursue me as I
mount higher; higher, higher, melting into the azure distance; rise to my
supremest height of all, and love me here!" Then would the pretty
bodice, the clocked stocking, and the silver-buckled shoe be, like the
broad forehead and the bright eyes, fraught with the spring of a very
chamois, until the strain was over.

Not even over Vendale himself did these songs of hers cast a more potent
spell than over Joey Ladle in his different way. Steadily refusing to
muddle the harmony by taking any share in it, and evincing the supremest
contempt for scales and such-like rudiments of music--which, indeed,
seldom captivate mere listeners--Joey did at first give up the whole
business for a bad job, and the whole of the performers for a set of
howling Dervishes. But, descrying traces of unmuddled harmony in a part-
song one day, he gave his two under cellarmen faint hopes of getting on
towards something in course of time. An anthem of Handel's led to
further encouragement from him: though he objected that that great
musician must have been down in some of them foreign cellars pretty much,