rned--'soon gained, soon gone,'" moralized the
tutor. He recited the passage deliberately, accurately, with slow,
impressive emphasis.

Shirley, by degrees, inclined her ear as he went on. Her face, before
turned from him, _re_turned towards him. When he ceased, she took the
word up as if from his lips; she took his very tone; she seized his very
accent; she delivered the periods as he had delivered them; she
reproduced his manner, his pronunciation, his expression.

It was now her turn to petition.

"Recall 'Le Songe d'Athalie,'" she entreated, "and say it."

He said it for her. She took it from him; she found lively excitement in
the pleasure of making his language her own. She asked for further
indulgence; all the old school pieces were revived, and with them
Shirley's old school days.

He had gone through some of the best passages of Racine and Corneille,
and then had heard the echo of his own deep tones in the girl's voice,
that modulated itself faithfully on his. "Le chene et le Roseau," that
most beautiful of La Fontaine's fables, had been recited, well recited,
by the tutor, and the pupil had animatedly availed herself of the
lesson. Perhaps a simultaneous feeling seized them now, that their
enthusiasm had kindled to a glow, which the slight fuel of French poetry
no longer sufficed to feed; perhaps they longed for a trunk of English
oak to be thrown as a Yule log to the devouring flame. Moore observed,
"And these are our best pieces! And we have nothing more dramatic,
nervous, natural!"

And then he smiled and was silent. His whole nature seemed serenely
alight. He stood on the hearth, leaning his elbow on the mantelpiece,
musing not unblissfully.

Twilight was closing on the diminished autumn day. The schoolroom
windows--darkened with creeping plants, from which no high October winds
had as yet swept the sere foliage--admitted scarce a gleam of sky; but
the fire gave light enough to talk by.

And now Louis Moore addressed his pupil in French, and she answered at
first with laughing hesitation and in broken phrase. Moore encouraged
while he corrected her. Henry joined in the lesson; the two scholars
stood opposite the master, their arms round each other's waists. Tartar,
who long since had craved and obtained admission, sat sagely in the
centre of the rug, staring at the blaze which burst fitful from morsels
of coal among the red cinders. The group were happy enough, but--

"Pleasures are like pop