"But papa has been talking to the judges about it. I heard him say your singing was worth listening to. I suppose he had been telling them all about you, and the whole romance, you know, of Mrs. Peter Arkell's marriage, for one of them--it was the old one--said he used to be intimate with her father, Colonel Cheveley. Here comes the dean! that's to ask you to sing." He sat down at once, and sang a song of the day. Then he went on to one that I dare say you all know and like--"Shall I, wasting in despair." At its conclusion one of the judges--it was the old one, as Georgina irreverently called him--came to him at the piano, and asked if he could sing Luther's Hymn. A few chords by way of prelude, lasting some few minutes, probably played to form a break between the worldly song and the sacred one--for if anyone was ever endowed with an innate sense of what was due to sacred things, it was Henry Arkell--and then the grand old hymn, in all its beautiful simplicity, burst upon their ears. Never had it been done greater justice to than it was by that solitary college boy. The room was hushed to stillness; the walls echoed with the sweet sounds; the solemn words thrilled on the listeners' hearts, and the singer's whole soul seemed to go up with them. Oh, how strange it was, that the judge should have called for that particular, sacred song! The echoes of it died away in the deepest stillness. It was broken by Henry himself; he closed the piano, as if nothing else must be allowed to come after that; and the tacit mandate was accepted, and nobody thought of inquiring how he came to assume the liberty in the dean's house. Gradually the room resumed its humming and its self-absorption, and Georgina Beauclerc, under cover of it, went up to him. "How could you make the excuse that your head was aching? None, with any sort of sickness upon them, could sing as you have just done." "Not even with heart sickness," he answered. "Now you are going to be absurd again! What do you mean?" "To-night has taught me a great deal, Georgina. If I have been foolish enough--fond enough, I might say--to waver in my doubts before, that's over for ever." "So much the better; you will be cured now." She had spoken only lightly, not meaning to be unkind or unfeeling; but she saw what she had done, by his quivering lip. Leaning across him as he stood, under cover of showing him something on the table, she spoke in a deep, earnest tone. "Henry, you know it could never be. Better that you should see the truth now, than go on in this dream of folly. Stay away for a short while if you will, and overget it; and then we will be fast friends as before." "And this is to be the final ending?" She stole a glance round at him, his voice had so strange a sound in it. Every trace of colour had faded from his face. "Yes; it is the only possible ending. If you get on well and become somebody grand, you and I can be as brother and sister in after life."