"Yes, Master Auchester, always; and I find it not enough." "But do you practise without a piano?" "Yes, it is best for me; but when I come to my lessons and hear the delightful keys, I feel as if music had come out of heaven to talk with me." "Ah, Miss Benette!" said Davy, with a kind of exultation, "what will it be when you are singing _in_ the heart of a grand orchestra?" "I never heard one, sir, you know; but I should think that it was like going into heaven after music and remaining there." "But were you not at the festival, Miss Benette?" "Oh, no!" "How very odd, when I was there!" Davy looked suddenly at her; but though his quick, bright glance might have startled away her answer, that came as calmly as all her words,--like a breeze awakening from the south. "I did not desire to go; Mr. Davy had the kindness to propose I should, but I knew it would make me idle afterwards, and I cannot afford to waste my time. I am growing old." "Now, Miss Benette, there is our servant or your nurse," for I heard a knock. "Will you let me come to-morrow?" "Just for half an hour only, because I want to sit with Laura." "I thank you; thank you!" "How did you get home last night?" I asked, on the promised meeting. She was sitting at the window, where the light was strongest, for her delicate work was in her hand; and as the beams of a paler sun came in upon her, I thought I had seen something like her somewhere before in a picture as it were framed in a dusky corner, but itself making for its own loveliness a shrine of light. Had I travelled among studios and galleries, I must have been struck by her likeness to those rich-hued but fairest ideals of the sacred schools of painting which have consecrated the old masters as worshippers of the highest in woman; but I had never seen anything of the kind except in cold prints. That strange reminiscence of what we never have really seen, in what we at present behold, appertains to a certain temperament only,--that temperament in which the ideal notion is so definite that all the realities the least approximating thereunto strike as its semblances, and all that it finds beautiful it compares so as to combine with the beautiful itself. I do not suppose I had this consciousness that afternoon, but I perfectly remember saying, before Clara rose to welcome me as she always did, "You look exactly like a picture." "Do I? But no people in pictures are made at work. Oh, it is very unpicturesque!" and she smiled. "I am not going to sing, Miss Benette; there is no time in just half an hour." "I _must_ practise, Master Auchester; I cannot afford to lose my half hours and half hours." "But I want to ask you some questions. Now do answer me, please." "You shall make long questions, then, and I short answers." She began to sing her florid exercises, a paper of which lay open upon the desk, in Davy's hand. "Well, first I want to know why are they unkind to Laura, and what they do to her which is unkind."