Her fingers picked the strings lightly, then warmly, and her voice rose, clear, quaint and high: 

    “Look up an look aroun,
    Fro you burden on de groun,
    Reach up an git de crown,
    When de Lord comes in de mornin—­
    When de Lord comes in de mornin!”

The voice had that strange pathos, veined with humor, which marks most negro hymns and songs, so that even those present who had never heard an Americanized negro sing were impressed and grew almost painfully quiet, till the voice fainted away into silence.

With the last low impulsion, however, the voice from without began again as if in reply.  At the first note one of the young girls present made a start for the window.  Mrs. Detlor laid a hand upon her arm.  “No,” she said, “you will spoil—­the effect.  Let us keep up the mystery.”

There was a strange, puzzled look on her face, apparent most to George Hagar.  The others only saw the lacquer of amusement, summoned for the moment’s use.

“Sit down,” she added, and she drew the young girl to her feet and passed an arm round her shoulder.  This was pleasant to the young girl.  It singled her out for a notice which would make her friends envious.

It was not a song coming to them from without—­not a melody, but a kind of chant, hummed first in a low sonorous tone, and then rising and falling in weird undulations.  The night was still, and the trees at the window gave forth a sound like the monotonous s-sh of rain.  The chant continued for about a minute.  While it lasted Mrs. Detlor sat motionless and her hands lay lightly on the shoulders of the young girl.  Hagar dropped his foot on the floor at marching intervals—­by instinct he had caught at the meaning of the sounds.  When the voice had finished, Mrs. Detlor raised her head toward the window with a quick, pretty way she had, her eyes much shaded by the long lashes.  Her lips were parted in the smile which had made both men and women call her merry, amiable and fascinating.

“You don’t know what it is, of course,” she said, looking round, as though the occurrence had been ordinary.  “It is a chant hummed by the negro woodcutters of Louisiana as they tramp homeward in the evening.  It is pretty, isn’t it?”

“It’s a rum thing,” said one they called the Prince, though Alpheus Richmond was the name by which his godmother knew him.  “But who’s the gentleman behind the scenes—­in the greenroom?”

As he said this he looked—­or tried to look—­knowingly at Mrs. Detlor, for, the Prince desired greatly to appear familiar with people and things theatrical, and Mrs. Detlor knew many in the actor and artist world.

Mrs. Detlor smiled in his direction, but the smile was not reassuring.  He was, however, delighted.  He almost asked her then and there to ride with him on the morrow, but he remembered that he could drive much better than he could ride, and, in the pause necessary to think the matter out, the chance passed—­he could not concentrate himself easily.