“Very well,” said Dr. Grey, with a great pretense of wrath; “then papa will have to invite himself, like the wicked old fairy at the christening of—­Who was it, Arthur?”

Arthur clapped his hands, which proceeding was instantly stopped by Christian.  “It was the Sleeping Beauty, which you don’t know one bit about, and I do, and ever so many more tales.  She used to tell me them in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, and they were so nice and so funny!  She shall tell you some after tea.  And we’ll make her sing too.  Papa, did you ever hear her sing?”

“No,” said Dr. Grey.

“Oh, but I have.  She’ll sing for me,” returned Arthur, proudly.  “She said she would, though she had meant never to sing again.”

Christian blushed violently, for the boy, in his unconscious way, had referred to a little episode of his illness, when, having exhausted all efforts to soothe him into drowsiness, she had tried her voice, silent for many months—­silent since before she had known Dr. Grey.  She had wished it so—­wished to bury all relics of that time of her youth deep down, so that no chance hand could ever dig them up again.

“Do you really sing?” asked Dr. Grey, a little surprised, and turning full upon her those grave, gentle, tender eyes.

She blushed more painfully than ever, but she answered steadily, “Yes, I was supposed to have a very fine voice.  My father wished it cultivated for the stage.  It might have been so if things had been different.”

“Would you have liked it?—­the stage, I mean.”

“Oh no, no!” with a visible, unmistakable shudder.  “I would have resisted to the last.  I hated it.”

“Was that why you left off singing?”

It would have been so easy to tell a lie—­a little harmless white lie but Christian could not do it.  She could keep silence to any extent, but falsehood was impossible to her.  She dropped her eyes; but the color once more overspread her whole face as she answered, distinctly and decisively, “No.”

It surprised her somewhat afterward, not then—­her heart was beating too violently for her to notice any thing much—­that her husband asked her no farther question, but immediately turned the conversation to Arthur’s tea-party, in the discussion of which both were so eager to amuse the invalid that the other subject dropped—­naturally, it appeared; anyhow, effectually.

But when the two other children came in to see Arthur, he again recurred to her singing, which had evidently taken a strong hold upon his imagination.

“Papa, you must hear her.  Mother, sing the song with pretty little twiddle-twiddles in it—­far prettier than Aunt Henrietta’s things—­ something about warbling in her breath.”

“Oh no, not that,” said Christian, shrinking involuntarily.  What from?  Was it from a ghostly vision of the last time she had sung it—­that is properly, to a piano-forte accompaniment, played by fingers that had afterward caught hold of her trembling fingers, and been a living comment on the song?  It was that exquisite one from Handel’s “Acis and Galatea:”