"So do I," said Hortense.

"I wish they could come back."

"So do I," smiled Hortense. Then, as if to check more: "I suppose,
Ramsay, you would want to drown us all--Ben and Jack and Rebecca and
me."

"And I suppose you would want to stand us all on our heads," I retorted.

Then we both laughed, and Hortense demanded if I had as much skill with
the lyre as with the sword. She had heard that I was much given to
chanting vain airs and wanton songs, she said.

And this is what I sang, with a heart that knocked to the notes of the
old madrigal like the precentor's tuning-fork to a meeting-house psalm:

"Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting,
Which, clad in damask mantles, deck the arbours,
And then behold your lips where sweet love harbours,
My eyes perplex me with a double doubting,
Whether the roses be your lips, or your lips the roses."


Barely had I finished when Mistress Hortense seats herself at the
spinet, and, changing the words to suit her saucy fancy, trills off
that ballad but newly writ by one of our English courtiers:

"Shall I, wasting in despair,