'Welcome, welcome, my Irish friend; I was afraid you had forgotten us. I was with Monsieur O'Hara, and he did not know your address, or I would have called on you in person to render you my thanks for your present to my little Song-bird. See, she was practising one of your plaintive airs as you entered. What a world of sadness is in your Irish music! It is like the sighing of the wind through a lonely forest in the night-time.' The O'Hoolohan Roe approached the piano. A richly-bound volume of Gaelic music, a harp rising in golden relief from its ground of green on the cover, lay before Berthe. The page at which it was open was headed, in illuminated letters, _Eiblin-a-ruin_. The white neck of the maiden suffused with a delicate pink, such a pink as we see sometimes colouring the sea-shell, at the undisguised glance of admiration of the Irishman. She tossed up her pretty head, looking so classic under its canopy of chestnut hair, and regarded him with frank eyes as he began to speak. It was too much for the O'Hoolohan Roe; he was not proof against woman's gaze; he got embarrassed, stuttered in the middle of some phrase of congratulation about the correctness of her taste, and finally fell back _hors de combat_. To add to his confusion, there was a traitorous crash as he flopped down in a chair--the hand-mirror in his back-pocket was broken! She followed him with an arch, wicked smile; her brown eyes wilfully sparkled, and a line of ivory showed itself between the cherry bordering of her lips. It was a critical moment. But the _esprit Français_ is not wanting in ingenuity. It is equal to every occasion. 'Shall I play this beautiful air for our kind friend, grandfather? It is a poor way to show my gratitude, but it is the best and only way I have.' The O'Hoolohan Roe opened a sentence which, we dare say, might have been very eloquent had it been completed, but unluckily a severe fit of coughing arrested him mid-way, and necessitated the production of the perfumed handkerchief. 'Do, dear,' said Captain Chauvin. 'I am in love with it; I think I could almost play it in the dark.' The O'Hoolohan Roe seemed as if he would have no particular objection to a nether darkness--a darkness that would shut out his presence even from himself--falling on the scene. Berthe commenced playing. The spirit of music lives and moves and has its being in the Gaelic air, and she played as one who felt, admired, and held communion with that spirit--not with her fingers merely, but with her soul, a beautiful, sensitive, emotional soul. The chords thrilled like sentient creatures, and voiced their melodious plaints, now one by one, now in murmuring volume, until the very atmosphere was languid with the melting sweetness, and the pathetic notes stole out by the flowers and the enraptured throstle in the window to soar upwards to the clouds.