ss, my angel!" he said, with fond glistening eyes.
He ate little or nothing, and sighed, and said "Good Percival!" when
his friend laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the hand,
and asked her if she would be "so sweet as to play to him." She
complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his
watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green
protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one
side, and he gently beat time with two of his yellow-white fingers. He
highly approved of the music, and tenderly admired Laura's manner of
playing--not as poor Hartright used to praise it, with an innocent
enjoyment of the sweet sounds, but with a clear, cultivated, practical
knowledge of the merits of the composition, in the first place, and of
the merits of the player's touch in the second. As the evening closed
in, he begged that the lovely dying light might not be profaned, just
yet, by the appearance of the lamps. He came, with his horribly silent
tread, to the distant window at which I was standing, to be out of his
way and to avoid the very sight of him--he came to ask me to support
his protest against the lamps. If any one of them could only have
burnt him up at that moment, I would have gone down to the kitchen and
fetched it myself.

"Surely you like this modest, trembling English twilight?" he said
softly. "Ah! I love it. I feel my inborn admiration of all that is
noble, and great, and good, purified by the breath of heaven on an
evening like this. Nature has such imperishable charms, such
inextinguishable tenderness for me!--I am an old, fat man--talk which
would become your lips, Miss Halcombe, sounds like a derision and a
mockery on mine. It is hard to be laughed at in my moments of
sentiment, as if my soul was like myself, old and overgrown. Observe,
dear lady, what a light is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your
heart, as it penetrates mine?"

He paused, looked at me, and repeated the famous lines of Dante on the
Evening-time, with a melody and tenderness which added a charm of their
own to the matchless beauty of the poetry itself.

"Bah!" he cried suddenly, as the last cadence of those noble Italian
words died away on his lips; "I make an old fool of myself, and only
weary you all! Let us shut up the window in our bosoms and get back to
the matter-of-fact world. Percival! I sanction the admission of the
lamps. Lady Glyde--Miss H