really beautiful music, which doesn't want it; it would be
sinful waste; it's not so much the tune that I want to hear as the
fresh young voice; sing me something French, something light,
something amiable and droll; that I may forget the song, and only
remember the singer."

"All right, M. l'Abbe," and Barty sings a delightful little song by
Gustave Nadaud, called "Petit bonhomme vit encore."

And the good Abbe is in the seventh heaven, and quite forgets to
forget the song.

And so, cakes and wine, and good-night--and M. l'Abbe goes humming
all the way home....

"He, quoi! pour des peccadilles
Gronder ces pauvres amours?
Les femmes sont si gentilles,
Et l'on n'aime pas toujours!
C'est bonhomme
Qu'on me nomme....
Ma gaite, c'est mon tresor!
Et bonhomme vit encor'--
Et bonhomme vit encor'!"

An extraordinary susceptibility to musical sound was growing in
Barty since his trouble had overtaken him, and with it an
extraordinary sensitiveness to the troubles of other people, their
partings and bereavements and wants, and aches and pains, even those
of people he didn't know; and especially the woes of children, and
dogs and cats and horses, and aged folk--and all the live things
that have to be driven to market and killed for our eating--or shot
at for our fun!

All his old loathing of sport had come back, and he was getting his
old dislike of meat once more, and to sicken at the sight of a
butcher's shop; and the sight of a blind man stirred him to the
depths ... even when he learnt how happy a blind man can be!

These unhappy things that can't be helped preoccupied him as if he
had been twenty, thirty, fifty years older; and the world seemed to
him a shocking place, a gray, bleak, melancholy hell where there was
nothing but sadness, and badness, and madness.

And bit by bit, but very soon, all his old trust in an all-merciful,
all-powerful ruler of the universe fell from him; he shed it like an
old skin; it sloughed itself away; and with it all his old conceit
of himself as a very fine fellow, taller, handsomer, cleverer than
anybody else, "bar two or three"! Such darling beliefs are the best
stays we can have; and he found life hard to face without them.

And he got as careful of his aunt Caroline, and as anxious about her
little fads and fancies and ailments, as if he'd been an old woman
himself.

Imagine how she grew to dote on him!

And he q