“A child’s trick,” began Hortense, catching at the shafts of light.

“I often think of those old days on the beach.”

“So do I,” said Hortense.

“I wish they could come back.”

“So do I,” smiled Hortense.  Then, as if to check more:  “I suppose, Ramsay, you would want to drown us all—­Ben and Jack and Rebecca and me.”

“And I suppose you would want to stand us all on our heads,” I retorted.

Then we both laughed, and Hortense demanded if I had as much skill with the lyre as with the sword.  She had heard that I was much given to chanting vain airs and wanton songs, she said.

And this is what I sang, with a heart that knocked to the notes of the old madrigal like the precentor’s tuning-fork to a meeting-house psalm: 

  “Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting,
    Which, clad in damask mantles, deck the arbours,
    And then behold your lips where sweet love harbours,
  My eyes perplex me with a double doubting,
  Whether the roses be your lips, or your lips the roses.”

Barely had I finished when Mistress Hortense seats herself at the spinet, and, changing the words to suit her saucy fancy, trills off that ballad but newly writ by one of our English courtiers: 

  “Shall I, wasting in despair,
  Die because—­Rebecca’s—­fair? 
  Or make pale my cheeks with care
  ’Cause Rebecca’s rosier are?”

“Hortense!” I protested.

  “Be he fairer than the day
  Or the June-field coils of hay;
  If he be not so to me,
  What care I how fine he be?”

There was such merriment in the dark-lashed eyes, I defy Eli Kirke himself to have taken offence; and so, like many another youth, I was all too ready to be the pipe on which a dainty lady played her stops.  As the song faded to the last tinkling notes of the spinet her fingers took to touching low, tuneless melodies like thoughts creeping into thoughts, or perfume of flowers in the dark.  The melting airs slipped into silence, and Hortense shut her eyes, “to get the memory of it,” she said.  I thought she meant some new-fangled tune.

“This is memory enough for me,” said I.

“Oh?” asked Hortense, and she uncovered all the blaze of the dark lights hid in those eyes.

“Faith, Hortense,” I answered, like a moth gone giddy in flame, “your naughty music wakes echoes of what souls must hear in paradise.”

“Then it isn’t naughty,” said Hortense, beginning to play fiercely, striking false notes and discords and things.

“Hortense,” said I.

“No—­Ramsay!” cried Hortense, jangling harder than ever.

“But—­yes!—­Hortense——­”

And in bustled M. Picot, hastier than need, methought.

“What, Hillary?  Not a-bed yet, child?  Ha!—­crow’s-feet under eyes to-morrow!  Bed, little baggage!  Forget not thy prayers!  Pish!  Pish!  Good-night!  Good-night!”