toes. Thank you. Now you had better go away; this is not at all the sort
of music you would understand."

"Classical, I suppose. I am afraid my taste is too uncultivated."

"Come, Miss Leigh," said the Colonel, half-impatiently, "we are all
expectation."

Bertie had approached Cecil, and taken up the book she was reading. It
was open at "Aux Italiens," and he murmured low some of the verses:--

"I thought of the dress she wore last time,
When we stood 'neath the cypress trees together,
In that lost land, in that soft clime,
In the crimson evening weather.
Of her muslin dress, for the eve was hot,
And her warm white neck in its golden chain.
And her full soft hair, just tied in a knot,
And falling loose again."

Mrs. Rolleston thought they looked very like lovers bending over the same
book, and their eyes speaking to each other, and in harmony with it went
rippling on one of the wildest and most plaintive of the Lieders under
Bluebell's sympathetic and brilliant fingers.

"What a magnificent touch that child has!" said Du Meresq, pausing to
listen.

"She has quite a genius for music;" and, mentally, she commented, "I
never heard her play better."