“Oh! just as often and as much as you like,” she said, and first held her hand to Arabella, next to Cornelia, and then to Adela.  She seemed to be hesitating before the gentlemen, and when Wilfrid raised his hat, she was put to some confusion, and bowed rather awkwardly, and retired.

“Good night, miss!” called Mr. Pericles.

“Good night, sir!” she answered from a little distance, and they could see that she was there emboldened to drop a proper curtsey in accompaniment.

Then the ladies stood together and talked of her, not with absolute enthusiasm.  For, “Was it not divine?” said Adela; and Cornelia asked her if she meant the last piece; and, “Oh, gracious! not that!” Adela exclaimed.  And then it was discovered how their common observation had fastened on the boot-lace; and this vagrant article became the key to certain speculations on her condition and character.

“I wish I’d had a dozen bouquets, that’s all!” cried Wilfrid. “she deserved them.”

“Has she sentiment for what she sings? or is it only faculty?” Cornelia put it to Mr. Sumner.

That gentleman faintly defended the stranger for the intrusion of the bumpkin tune.  “She did it so well!” he said.

“I complain that she did it too well,” uttered Cornelia, whose use of emphasis customarily implied that the argument remained with her.

Talking in this manner, and leisurely marching homeward, they were startled to hear Mr. Pericles, who had wrapped himself impenetrably in the bear, burst from his cogitation suddenly to cry out, in his harshest foreign accent:  “Yeaz!” And thereupon he threw open the folds, and laid out a forefinger, and delivered himself:  “I am made my mind!  I send her abroad to ze Academie for one, two, tree year.  She shall be instructed as was not before.  Zen a noise at La Scala.  No—­Paris!  No—­London!  She shall astonish London fairst.—­Yez! if I take a theatre!  Yez! if I buy a newspaper!  Yez! if I pay feefty-sossand pound!”

His singular outlandish vehemence, and the sweeping grandeur of a determination that lightly assumed the corruptibility of our Press, sent a smile circling among the ladies and gentlemen.  The youth who had wished to throw the fair unknown a dozen bouquets, caught himself frowning at this brilliant prospect for her, which was to give him his opportunity.

CHAPTER III

The next morning there were many “tra-las” and “tum-te-turns” over the family breakfast-table; a constant humming and crying, “I have it”; and after two or three bars, baffled pauses and confusion of mind.  Mr. Pericles was almost abusive at the impotent efforts of the sisters to revive in his memory that particular delicious melody, the composition of the fair singer herself.  At last he grew so impatient as to arrest their opening notes, and even to interrupt their unmusical consultations, with “No:  it is no use; it is no use:  no, no, I say!”