“Pray, don’t,” cried she, pettishly.  “You are sure to do it all wrong.”

“Let me try,” pleaded Jack.  “If you just look at me I shall know when to turn.”

“Well, see if you can bring that book” (indicating a very heavy one at the bottom of a pile) “without spilling the rest, or dropping it on your toes.  Thank you.  Now you had better go away; this is not at all the sort of music you would understand.”

“Classical, I suppose.  I am afraid my taste is too uncultivated.”

“Come, Miss Leigh,” said the Colonel, half-impatiently, “we are all expectation.”

Bertie had approached Cecil, and taken up the book she was reading.  It was open at “Aux Italiens,” and he murmured low some of the verses:—­

  “I thought of the dress she wore last time,
  When we stood ’neath the cypress trees together,
  In that lost land, in that soft clime,
  In the crimson evening weather. 
  Of her muslin dress, for the eve was hot,
  And her warm white neck in its golden chain. 
  And her full soft hair, just tied in a knot,
  And falling loose again.”

Mrs. Rolleston thought they looked very like lovers bending over the same book, and their eyes speaking to each other, and in harmony with it went rippling on one of the wildest and most plaintive of the Lieders under Bluebell’s sympathetic and brilliant fingers.

“What a magnificent touch that child has!” said Du Meresq, pausing to listen.

“She has quite a genius for music;” and, mentally, she commented, “I never heard her play better.”

“She plays,” said Bertie, “as if she were desperately in love.”

“With Mr. Vavasour?” laughed Cecil.

“With no one, I dare say.  It indicates, however, a besoin d’aimer.”

Cecil took up “The Wanderer” again, but she soon found they were not en rapport.  The captain’s temperament was now, ear and fancy, under the spell of the fair musician.

Bertie was soon by the piano, but Bluebell ceased almost directly after.  He had brought from Montreal [unreadable] Minstrel Melodies, then just out, and asked her to try one.  She excused herself on the plea that it was a man’s song, so he began it himself.  Who has not suffered from the male amateur, who comes forward with bashful fatuity to favour the company with a strain tame and inaudible as a nervous school girl’s?  Bertie was no musician, and his songs were all picked up by ear, but there was a passion and timbre in the tenor voice, fascinating if unskilful, and the refrain of “Gentle Annie,”

  “Shall we never more behold her,
  Never hear that winning voice again,
  Till the spring time comes, gentle Annie,
  Till the wild flowers are scattered o’er the plain?”

lingered with its mournful, tender inflection in more than one ear that night.

Afterwards the two young men from the barracks, muffled to the chin in buffalo robes, lit the inevitable cigar, and jingled merrily off to the music of the bells.