since she did, he was sure her voice was contralto.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because your face is contralto."

She turned from his eyes as if they hurt her, and walked over to Louis's
side.

It could hardly be called singing. Louis had often said that her voice
needed merely to be set to rhythmic time to be music; in pursuance of which
idea he would put into her hand some poem that touched his fancy, tell her
to read it, and as she read, he would adapt to it an accompaniment
according to the meaning and measure of the lines, --grandly solemn,
daintily tripping, or wildly inspiriting. It was more like a chant than a
song. To-night he chose Tennyson's Bugle-song. Her voice was subservient
to the accompaniment, that shook its faint, sweet bugle-notes at first as
in a rosy splendor; it rose and swelled and echoed and reverberated and
died away slowly as if loath to depart. Arnold's playing was the poem,
Ruth's voice the music the poet might have heard as he wrote, sweet as a
violin, deep as the feeling evolved, --for when she came to the line
beginning, "oh, love, they die in yon rich sky," she might have stood alone
with one, in some high, clear place, so mellow was the thrill of her voice,
so rapt the expression of her face. Kemp looked as if he would not tire if
the sound should "grow forever and forever."

Mrs. Levice was wakeful after she had gone to bed. Her husband also seemed
inclined to prolong the night, for he made no move to undress.

"Jules," said she in a low, confidential tone, "do you realize that our