ckets, of pleasant Hertfordshire, where our
footsteps met a small bombardment of bursting seed-pods of the furze,
along the green common that sloped to the village. I thought of all
this, and of HER everlasting quiet.

With a different voice the words of the song would have sent me out of
hearing; now I stood rooted to the spot, as the notes floated out
past me to the nervelessness of the Indian Ocean, every one of them a
commandment from behind the curtain of a sanctuary.

The voice was a warm, full contralto of exquisite culture. It suggested
depths of rich sound behind, from which the singer, if she chose, might
draw, until the room and the deck and the sea ached with sweetness. I
scarcely dared to look in to see who it was, lest I should find it a
dream. I stood with my head turned away towards the dusky ocean. When,
at last, with the closing notes of the song, I went to the port-hole
and looked in, I saw that the singer was Miss Treherne. There was
an abstracted look in her eyes as she raised them, and she seemed
unconscious of the applause following the last chords of the
accompaniment. She stood up, folding the music as she did so, and
unconsciously raised her eyes toward the port-hole where I was. Her
glance caught mine, and instantly a change passed over her face. The
effect of the song upon her was broken; she flushed slightly, and, as I
thought, with faint annoyance. I know of nothing so little complimentary
to a singer as the audience that patronisingly listens outside a room
or window,--not bound by any sense of duty as an audience,--between whom
and the artists an unnatural barrier is raised. But I have reason to
think now that Belle Treherne was not wholly moved by annoyance--that
she had seen something unusual, maybe oppressive, in my look. She turned
to her father. He adjusted his glasses as if, in his pride, to see her
better. Then he fondly took her arm, and they left the room.

Then I saw Mrs. Falchion's face at the port-hole opposite. Her eyes were
on me. An instant before, I had intended following Miss Treherne and her
father; now some spirit of defiance, some unaccountable revolution, took
possession of me, so that I flashed back to her a warm recognition. I
could not have believed it possible, if it had been told of me, that,
one minute affected by beautiful and sacred remembrances, the next I
should be yielding to the unimpassioned tyranny of a woman who could
never be anything but a stumbling