Connie made the life of the leading boat.  Something had roused her, and she began to reveal some of the “parlour-tricks,” with which she had amused the Palazzo Barberini in her Roman days.  A question from Pryce stirred her into quoting some of the folk-songs of the Campagna, some comic, some tragic, fitting an action to them so lively and true that even those of her hearers who could not follow the dialect sat entranced.  Then some one said—­“But they ought to be sung!” And suddenly, though rather shyly, she broke into a popular canzone of the Garibaldian time, describing the day of Villa Gloria; the march of the morning, the wild hopes, the fanfaronade; and in the evening, a girl hiding a wounded lover and weeping both for him and “Italia” undone.

The sweet low sounds floated along the river.

“Delicious!” said Sorell, holding his oar suspended to listen.  He remembered the song perfectly.  He had heard her sing it in many places—­Rome, Naples, Syracuse.  It was a great favourite with her mother, for whom the national upheaval of Italy—­the heroic struggle of the Risorgimento—­had been a life-long passion.

“Why did Connie never tell us she could sing!” said Mrs. Hooper in her thin peevish voice.  “Girls really shouldn’t hide their accomplishments.”

Sorell’s oar dropped into the water with a splash.

* * * * *

At Marston Ferry, there was a general disembarking, a ramble along the river bank and tea under a group of elms beside a broad reach of the stream.  Sorell noticed, that in spite of the regrouping of the two boat loads, as they mingled in the walk, Herbert Pryce never left Connie’s side.  And it seemed to him, and to others, that she was determined to keep him there.  He must gather yellow flag and pink willow-herb for her, must hook a water-lily within reach of the bank with her parasol, must explain to her about English farms, and landlords, and why the labourers were discontented—­why there were no peasant owners, as in Italy—­and so on, and so on.  Round-faced Mrs. Maddison, who had never seen the Hoopers’ niece before, watched her with amusement, deciding that, distinguished and refined as the girl was, she was bent on admiration, and not too critical as to whence it came.  The good-natured, curly-haired Meyrick, who was discontentedly reduced to helping Alice and Nora with the tea, and had never been so bored with a river picnic before, consoled himself by storing up rich materials for a “chaff” of Douglas when they next met—­perhaps that evening, after hall?  Alice meanwhile laughed and talked with the freshman whom Meyrick had brought with him from Marmion.  Her silence and pallor had gone; she showed a kind of determined vivacity.  Sorell, with his strange gift of sympathy, found himself admiring her “pluck.”