t one night with Fritz on the Neva to hear a woman in
a boat singing--a peasant girl with high cheek-bones--and I caught a
frightful chill."

"Ah!" said Sir Donald. "What was the song? I know a good many of the
Northern peasant songs."

Suddenly Lady Holme got up, letting her gloves fall to the ground.

"I'll sing it to you," she said.

Robin Pierce touched her arm.

"For Heaven's sake not to Miss Filberte's accompaniment!"

"Very well. But come and sit where you can see me."

"I won't," he said with brusque obstinacy.

"Madman!" she answered. "Anyhow, you come, Sir Donald."

And she walked lightly away towards the piano, followed by Sir Donald,
who walked lightly too, but uncertainly, on his thin, stick-like legs.

"What are you up to, Vi?" said Lord Holme, as she came near to him.

"I'm going to sing something for Sir Donald."

"Capital! Where's Miss Filberte?"

"Here I am!" piped a thin alto voice.

There was a rustle of skirts as the accompanist rose hastily from her
chair.

"Sit down, please, Miss Filberte," said Lady Holme in a voice of ice.

Miss Filberte sat down like one who has been knocked on the head with a
hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that
raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright,
and played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was
so determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still
thinking about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:

"Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly
dish omitted."

Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme's eyes,
changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence.
She leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang,
looking up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had
the clear melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought
the stars out within that room and set purple distances before the
eyes. Water swayed in it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm
weather, when the black spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours
are motionless as fingers of skeletons pointing towards the moon.
Mysterious lights lay round a silent shore. And in the wide air, on the
wide waters, one woman was singing to herself of a sorrow that was deep
as the grave, and that no one upon the earth knew of save she who sang.
The song was very short. It had only two