his is not at all the sort
of music you would understand."

"Classical, I suppose. I am afraid my taste is too uncultivated."

"Come, Miss Leigh," said the Colonel, half-impatiently, "we are all
expectation."

Bertie had approached Cecil, and taken up the book she was reading. It
was open at "Aux Italiens," and he murmured low some of the verses:--

"I thought of the dress she wore last time,
When we stood 'neath the cypress trees together,
In that lost land, in that soft clime,
In the crimson evening weather.
Of her muslin dress, for the eve was hot,
And her warm white neck in its golden chain.
And her full soft hair, just tied in a knot,
And falling loose again."

Mrs. Rolleston thought they looked very like lovers bending over the same
book, and their eyes speaking to each other, and in harmony with it went
rippling on one of the wildest and most plaintive of the Lieders under
Bluebell's sympathetic and brilliant fingers.

"What a magnificent touch that child has!" said Du Meresq, pausing to
listen.

"She has quite a genius for music;" and, mentally, she commented, "I
never heard her play better."

"She plays," said Bertie, "as if she were desperately in love."

"With Mr. Vavasour?" laughed Cecil.

"With no one, I dare say. It indicates, however, a _besoin d'aimer_."

Cecil took up "The Wanderer" again, but she soon found they were not _en
rapport_. The captain's temperament was now, ear and fancy, under the
spell of the fair musician.

Bertie was soon by the piano, but Bluebell ceased almost directly after.
He had brought from Montreal [unreadable] Minstrel Melodies, then just
out, and asked her to try one. She excused herself on the plea that it
was a man's song, so he began it himself. Who has not suffered from the
male amateur, who comes forward with bashful fatuity to favour the
company with a strain tame and inaudible as a nervous school girl's?
Bertie was no musician, and his songs were all picked up by ear, but
there was a passion and _timbre_ in the tenor voice, fascinating if
unskilful, and the refrain of "Gentle Annie,"

"Shall we never more behold her,
Never hear that winning voice again,
Till the spring time comes, gentle Annie,
Till the wild flowers are scattered o'er the plain?"

lingered with its mournful, tender inflection in more than one ear
that night.

Afterwards the two young men from the barracks, muffled to the chin in
buffalo robes, lit the inevi