“She is exceedingly fortunate in having secured a most admirable person for her companion. Besides being educated, and refined, and beautiful, Miss Lyle impresses me as a remarkable woman. Yes, as a very remarkable woman.” The next night Godfrey recorded: “There is nothing quite so foolish as an old man in love! I wonder if he thinks she can care for him!—and yet he blushed to-day when I found him turning the leaves of her music and listening to her singing. I never knew him listen two minutes to Alice and Jule,—and no wonder, such operatic screeches as they make when Professor La Farge is there, and the boys in the street stop and mock them. Edith’s voice is the sweetest I ever heard, and so sad that it makes a chap feel for his bandanna. Why, even father told auntie that her singing made him think of poor Emily, meaning my mother! It is a bad sign when a live woman like Edith Lyle makes a man think of his dead wife. I wonder what she thinks of him! She looks as unconcerned as a block of marble; but you can’t tell what is in a woman’s mind, and widowers are awful. Why, there have been forty women after father already; but I must say he has behaved admirably thus far, and never spoken to a bonnet outside our own family, unless it were to Miss Esther Armstrong, and that is nothing. She is the Hampstead school-ma’am, and has thrashed me more than twenty times.” In Colonel Schuyler’s journal the record was as follows: “I wonder if my dear Emily knows how much Miss Lyle’s singing makes me think of her and her grave under the evergreen, where we did ‘Lay her away, one bright autumn day, When the flowers were beginning to fade.’ Miss Lyle has a singularly sweet, plaintive voice, and it affects me strangely, for I did not know I cared for music. Emily never sang, and the young ladies at home make very singular sounds sometimes. It is strange about her losing her voice, or rather her power to reach the higher notes. It must have been a fearful shock of some kind, and she evidently does not like to talk of it; for, when I questioned her a little and advised her seeing a physician, she seemed disturbed and agitated, and even distressed. Dr. Malcolm at Hampstead would know just what to do for her, and she ought to have medical advice, for she has a remarkable voice,—a very remarkable voice.” When Colonel Schuyler liked a thing, it was _remarkable_, and when he liked it very much, it was _very_ remarkable; so, when he wrote what he did of Edith and her voice, he had passed upon her his highest encomium. Four weeks went by, and he still lingered at Oakwood, and on the last day of the fourth week wrote again: