Could she have had the temerity?  Jane marvelled at herself.

She doubted that the weighty pair of tears had dropped for the country.  Captain Con would have shed them over Erin, and many of them.  Captain Philip’s tone was too plain and positive:  he would be a most practical unhistrionic rebel.

‘You would countenance a revolt?’ she said, striking at that extreme to elicit the favourable answer her tones angled for.  And it was instantly: 

‘Not in arms.’  He tried an explanation by likening the dissension to a wrangle in a civilised family over an unjust division of property.

And here, as he was marking the case with some nicety and difficulty, an itinerant barrel-organ crashed its tragic tale of music put to torture at the gate.  It yelled of London to Jane, throttled the spirits of the woods, threw a smoke over the country sky, befouled the pure air she loved.

The instrument was one of the number which are packed to suit all English tastes and may be taken for a rough sample of the jumble of them, where a danceless quadrille-tune succeeds a suicidal Operatic melody and is followed by the weariful hymn, whose last drawl pert polka kicks aside.  Thus does the poor Savoyard compel a rich people to pay for their wealth.  Not without pathos in the abstract perhaps do the wretched machines pursue their revolutions of their factory life, as incapable of conceiving as of bestowing pleasure:  a bald cry for pennies through the barest pretence to be agreeable but Jane found it hard to be tolerant of them out of London, and this one affecting her invalid and Mrs. Adister must be dismissed.  Wayland was growling; he had to be held by the collar.  He spied an objectionable animal.  A jerky monkey was attached to the organ; and his coat was red, his kepi was blue; his tailor had rigged him as a military gentleman.  Jane called to the farm-wife.  Philip assured her he was not annoyed.  Jane observed him listening, and by degrees she distinguished a maundering of the Italian song she had one day sung to Patrick in his brother’s presence.

‘I remember your singing that the week before I went to India,’ said Philip, and her scarlet blush flooded her face.

‘Can you endure the noise?’ she asked him.

‘Con would say it shrieks “murder.”  But I used to like it once.’

Mrs. Lappett came answering to the call.  Her children were seen up the garden setting to one another with squared aprons, responsive to a livelier measure.

‘Bless me, miss, we think it so cheerful!’ cried Mrs. Lappett, and glanced at her young ones harmonious and out of mischief.

‘Very well,’ said Jane, always considerate for children.  She had forgotten the racked Mrs. Adister.

Now the hymn of Puritanical gloom-the peacemaker with Providence performing devotional exercises in black bile.  The leaps of the children were dashed.  A sallow two or three minutes composed their motions, and then they jumped again to the step for lively legs.  The similarity to the regimental band heading soldiers on the march from Church might have struck Philip.