s, that's all.'

'Healthy persons rarely have,' she remarked, and asked him, smiling
softly, whether he had a mind for music.

His insensibility to music was curious, considering how impressionable
he was to verse, and to songs of birds. He listened with an oppressed
look, as to something the particular secret of which had to be reached
by a determined effort of sympathy for those whom it affected. He
liked it if she did, and said he liked it, reiterated that he liked it,
clearly trying hard to comprehend it, as unmoved by the swell and sigh
of the resonant brass as a man could be, while her romantic spirit
thrilled to it, and was bountiful in glowing visions and in tenderness.

There hung her hand. She would not have refused to yield it. The hero
of her childhood, the friend of her womanhood, and her hero still, might
have taken her with half a word.

Beauchamp was thinking: She can listen to that brass band, and she shuts
her ears to this letter:

The reading of it would have been a prelude to the opening of his
heart to her, at the same time that it vindicated his dear and honoured
master, as he called Dr. Shrapnel. To speak, without the explanation of
his previous reticence which this letter would afford, seemed useless:
even the desire to speak was absent, passion being absent.

'I see papa; he is getting into a boat with some one,' said Cecilia,
and gave orders for the yacht to stand in toward the Club steps. 'Do you
know, Nevil, the Italian common people are not so subject to the charm
of music as other races? They have more of the gift, and I think less of
the feeling. You do not hear much music in Italy. I remember in the year
of Revolution there was danger of a rising in some Austrian city, and
a colonel of a regiment commanded his band to play. The mob was put in
good humour immediately.'

'It's a soporific,' said Beauchamp.

'You would not rather have had them rise to be slaughtered?'

'Would you have them waltzed into perpetual servility?'

Cecilia hummed, and suggested: 'If one can have them happy in any way?'

'Then the day of destruction may almost be dated.'

'Nevil, your terrible view of life must be false.'

'I make it out worse to you than to any one else, because I want our
minds to be united.'

'Give me a respite now and then.'

'With all my heart. And forgive me for beating my drum. I see what
others don't see, or else I feel it more; I don't know; but it appears
to me our countr