“Here?” he repeated in frank astonishment.  “Why?”

“Please, sir, I—­I—­it’s sunnier here, sir, and I—­I think it must be pining away.  It hardly ever sings in my bedroom.”

“Well, but,” he began—­then seeing the tears gathering on her eyelids, he finished with laughing good-nature—­“as long as Mrs. Leadbatter doesn’t reckon it an extra.”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Mary Ann, seriously.  “I’ll tell her.  Besides, she will be glad, because she don’t like the canary—­she says its singing disturbs her.  Her room is next to mine, you know, Mr. Lancelot.”

“But you said it doesn’t sing much.”

“Please, sir, I—­I mean in summer,” explained Mary Ann, in rosy confusion; “and—­and—­it’ll soon be summer, sir.”

“Sw—­e-e-t!” burst forth the canary, suddenly, as if encouraged by Mary Ann’s opinion.

It was a pretty little bird—­one golden yellow from beak to tail, as though it had been dipped in sunshine.

“You see, sir,” she cried eagerly, “it’s beginning already.”

“Yes,” said Lancelot, grimly; “but so is Beethoven.”

“I’ll hang it high up—­in the window,” said Mary Ann, “where the dog can’t get at it.”

“Well, I won’t take any responsibilities,” murmured Lancelot, resignedly.

“No, sir, I’ll attend to that,” said Mary Ann, vaguely.

After the installation of the canary Lancelot found himself slipping more and more into a continuous matter-of-course flirtation; more and more forgetting the slavey in the candid young creature who had, at moments, strange dancing lights in her awakened eyes, strange flashes of witchery in her ingenuous expression.  And yet he made a desultory struggle against what a secret voice was always whispering was a degradation.  He knew she had no real place in his life; he scarce thought of her save when she came bodily before his eyes with her pretty face and her trustful glance.

He felt no temptation to write sonatas on her eyebrow—­to borrow Peter’s variation, for the use of musicians, of Shakespeare’s “write sonnets on his mistress’s eyebrow”—­and, indeed, he knew she could be no fit mistress for him—­this starveling drudge, with passive passions, meek, accepting, with well-nigh every spark of spontaneity choked out of her.  The women of his dreams were quite other—­beautiful, voluptuous, full of the joy of life, tremulous with poetry and lofty thought, with dark amorous orbs that flashed responsive to his magic melodies.  They hovered about him as he wrote and played—­Venuses rising from the seas of his music.  And then—­with his eyes full of the divine tears of youth, with his brain a hive of winged dreams—­he would turn and kiss merely Mary Ann!  Such is the pitiful breed of mortals.