“With pleasure,” replied Hugh; but, to cover his hesitation, added, “I will be with you presently;” and ran up stairs to his own room.  “The old gentleman sits on his dignity—­can hardly be said to stand on it,” thought he, as he went.  “The poor relation, as she calls herself, treats me like a guest.  She is mistress here, however; that is clear enough.”

As he descended the stairs to the drawing-room, a voice rose through the house, like the voice of an angel.  At least so thought Hugh, hearing it for the first time.  It seemed to take his breath away, as he stood for a moment on the stairs, listening.  It was only Euphra singing The Flowers of the Forest.  The drawing-room door was still open, and her voice rang through the wide lofty hall.  He entered almost on tip-toe, that he might lose no thread of the fine tones.—­Had she chosen the song of Scotland out of compliment to him?—­She saw him enter, but went on without hesitating even.  In the high notes, her voice had that peculiar vibratory richness which belongs to the nightingale’s; but he could not help thinking that the low tones were deficient both in quality and volume.  The expression and execution, however, would have made up for a thousand defects.  Her very soul seemed brooding over the dead upon Flodden field, as she sang this most wailful of melodies—­this embodiment of a nation’s grief.  The song died away as if the last breath had gone with it; failing as it failed, and ceasing with its inspiration, as if the voice that sang lived only for and in the song.  A moment of intense silence followed.  Then, before Hugh had half recovered from the former, with an almost grand dramatic recoil, as if the second sprang out of the first, like an eagle of might out of an ocean of weeping, she burst into Scots wha hae.  She might have been a new Deborah, heralding her nation to battle.  Hugh was transfixed, turned icy cold, with the excitement of his favourite song so sung.—­Was that a glance of satisfied triumph with which Euphra looked at him for a single moment?—­She sang the rest of the song as if the battle were already gained; but looked no more at Hugh.

The excellence of her tones, and the lambent fluidity of her transitions, if I may be allowed the phrase, were made by her art quite subservient to the expression, and owed their chief value to the share they bore in producing it.  Possibly there was a little too much of the dramatic in her singing, but it was all in good taste; and, in a word, Hugh had never heard such singing before.  As soon as she had finished, she rose, and shut the piano.

“Do not, do not,” faltered Hugh, seeking to arrest her hand, as she closed the instrument.

“I can sing nothing after that,” she said with emotion, or perhaps excitement; for the trembling of her voice might be attributed to either cause.  “Do not ask me.”

Hugh respectfully desisted; but after a few minutes’ pause ventured to remark: