“Lorsque la mer était mauvaise Il chantait, le cour plus à l’aise, Gité, malgré vents et frimas, Dans un abri de la falaise... Pauvre P’tit Gas!” Down went the accompaniment a full octave; distant bells seemed to mingle with the score. One could discern the sobbing at the sea now, the pulsing of the tide, rising, rising, till with a swelling rush it submerged the reefs. “Or un soir la vague en furie....” Marguerite had long since forgotten where she was. She was singing as she had so often done on the cliffs of Plenhöel, and her _Pauvre P’tit Gas_ was as real to her as he had seemed then: “Malgré les brisants et l’orage Il attint la côte à la nage Puis il mourut ... tant était las!... Pauvre P’tit Gas!” Slower and slower came the words: “Il fut pleuré dans les ténèbres.... Pauvre P’tit Gas! Pauvre P’tit Gas!” At the last wailing chords she seemed to awaken, rose, and faced swiftly round, in evident surprise to see them all there, but utterly unconscious of the prodigious effect created. A little smile played hide-and-seek beneath “Antinoüs’s” mustache; _he_ had heard her sing that before; but the rest had not, and the spell seemed unbroken for a full minute before the applause began. The girl, startled and embarrassed, looked around in a long glance of astonishment, and met Basil’s eyes fixed upon hers in a manner she had never seen before; but when the others surrounded her with enthusiastic expressions of delight he remained where he had stood during her singing, and did not speak. CHAPTER VIII A drag upon the hand and brain, A chain of gold is still a chain. A huge rack of cloud was driving across the sky at a speed that frayed out long rags from its bellying sails, and trailed them heavily along the tops of the dark pine forest. The earth, but recently freed from the weight of the snow-mantle that for month after month had hidden it from sight, was brown and oozy, dotted with pools and ponds and spontaneous brooks and rivulets engendered by that appalling infliction, a Russian spring break-up. Hard to bear, even in Moscow or Petersburg, this manifestation of nature becomes in the open country an actual calamity; for it is no small trial to wade from liquid mud to liquid mud, from spongy road to spongier path, while the great wind-storms that precede and follow the breaking of the ice, gurgle and howl and hoot like an army of drunken banshees beneath the arch of deluge overhead.