“Sing to us now, then, will you not?” said Aimée. There was no insistence in her tone, only a courteous request; but he complied immediately, as he would no doubt have complied had she asked him to take a plunge into the sea. Nor did he require more than an instant to decide what he would sing. As he watched her uplifted face with the moonbeams falling on it, he had been thinking of a song of Heine’s, and the music--Schumann’s music--was in his throat, as it were; so he began at once: “The lotus flower feareth The splendor of the sun; Bowing her head and dreaming, She waits till the day is done. “The moon he is her lover; He wakes her with silvery light; To him unveils she, smiling, Her flower-face pure and white. “She gazeth on high in silence, Doth bloom and gleam and glow, Exhaling and weeping and trembling For love and love’s deep woe.” He sang “divinely,” as Fanny had said, for Nature had given him a voice of the finest order--a pure, melodious tenor--and, though it had never received much training, there was something in it to-night which took the place of training and made it unnecessary--a thrill of emotion, a depth of expression, which art can never teach. When the full, soft notes sank over the last cadence, Fanny cried out with admiration, and even Mr. Joscelyn condescended to say, “Bravo!” But Aimée did not speak at once, and it was only when Lennox looked into her “flower-face pure and white,” that she said, “You have a great gift, Mr. Kyrle, and a great power to bestow pleasure.” The words were kind, but what was there in the voice that seemed to Kyrle’s ear like a touch of frost? The exaltation of his mood sank under it, and he suddenly seemed in his own eyes to wear very much the aspect of a fool. What had he been doing? Singing out his heart to unsympathetic ears, led away by the magic of the night and the fairness of a face which, after all, was the face of a stranger, or, worse yet, of one who knew him only as the lover of Fanny Meredith. What had possessed him to take leave of his senses in this manner? Was this what was likely to happen to a man when he came out of the desert and found himself in unaccustomed contact with civilization again? Did the first lovely face on which he looked lead his senses astray?