“Shall I become a substitute for your mamma?” he said.

“And sing the second, so that I may practice?  Your cigar must have left you in a very amiable mood.”

“Well, suppose we try,” he said; and he proceeded to open out the roll of music which she had brought down.

“Which shall we take first?” he asked.

“It does not much matter,” she answered indifferently, and indeed she took up one of the duets by haphazard.

What was it made Mrs. Kavanagh’s companion suddenly lift her eyes from the cribbage-board and look with surprise to the other end of the room?  She had recognized the little prelude to one of her own duets, and it was being played by Mrs. Lorraine.  And it was Mrs. Lorraine who began to sing in a sweet, expressive and well-trained voice of no great power—­

  Love in thine eyes for ever plays;

and it was she to whom the answer was given—­

  He in thy snowy bosom strays;

and then, Sheila, sitting stupefied and pained and confused, heard them sing together—­

  He makes thy rosy lips his care,
  And walks the mazes of thy hair.

She had not heard the short conversation which had introduced this music; and she could not tell but that her husband had been practicing these duets—­her duets—­with some one else.  For presently they sang “When the rosy morn appearing,” and “I would that my love could silently,” and others, all of them in Sheila’s eyes, sacred to the time when she and Lavender used to sit in the little room at Borva.  It was no consolation to her that Mrs. Lorraine had but an imperfect acquaintance with them; that oftentimes she stumbled and went back over a bit of the accompaniment; that her voice was far from being striking.  Lavender, at all events, seemed to heed none of these things.  It was not as a music-master that he sang with her.  He put as much expression of love into his voice as ever he had done in the old days when he sang with his future bride.  And it seemed so cruel that this woman should have taken Sheila’s own duets from her to sing before her with her own husband.

Sheila learnt little more cribbage that evening.  Mrs. Kavanagh could not understand how her pupil had become embarrassed, inattentive, and even sad, and asked her if she was tired.  Sheila said she was very tired and would go.  And when she got her candle, Mrs. Lorraine and Lavender had just discovered another duet which they felt bound to try together as the last.

This was not the first time she had been more or less vaguely pained by her husband’s attentions to this young American lady; and yet she would not admit to herself that he was any way in the wrong.  She would entertain no suspicion of him.  She would have no jealousy in her heart, for how could jealousy exist with a perfect faith?  And so she had repeatedly reasoned herself out of these tentative feelings, and resolved that she would do neither her husband nor