"Now for 'James Lee's Wife,'" said the Colonel, who accepted the damsel's compliments for what they were worth. "You'll have to be very attentive if you want to find out what the poem means; for the Baron's delivery is a trifle spasmodic." And now de Cazalet stepped forward with a vellum-bound volume in his hand, dashed back his long sleek hair with a large white hand, glanced at the page, coughed faintly, and then began in thick, hurried accents, which kept getting thicker and more hurried as the poem advanced. It was given, not in lines, but in spasms, panted out, till at the close the Baron sank exhausted, breathless, like the hunted deer when the hounds close round him. "Beautiful! exquisite! too pathetic!" exclaimed a chorus of feminine voices. "I only wish the Browning Society could hear that: they would be delighted," said Mr. Faddie, who piqued himself upon being in the literary world. "It makes Browning so much easier to understand," remarked Mr. FitzJesse, with his habitual placidity. "Brings the whole thing home to you--makes it ever so much more real, don't you know," said Mrs. Torrington. "Poor James Lee!" sighed Mopsy. "Poor Mrs. Lee!" ejaculated Dopsy. "Did he die?" asked Miss St. Aubyn. "Did she run away from him?" inquired her sister, the railroad pace at which the Baron fired off the verses having left all those among his hearers who did not know the text in a state of agreeable uncertainty. So the night wore on, with more songs and duets from opera and opera-bouffe. No more of Beethoven's grand bursts of melody--now touched with the solemnity of religious feeling--now melting in human pathos--now light and airy, changeful and capricious as the skylark's song--a very fountain of joyous fancies. Mr. Tregonell had never appreciated Beethoven, being, indeed, as unmusical a soul as God ever created; but he thought it a more respectable thing that his wife should sit at her piano playing an order of music which only the privileged few could understand, than that she should delight the common herd by singing which savoured of music-hall and burlesque. "Is she not absolutely delicious?" said Mrs. Torrington, beating time with her fan. "How proud I should be of myself if I could sing like that. How proud you must be of your wife--such verve--such _élan_--so thoroughly in the spirit of the thing. That is the only kind of singing anybody really cares for now. One goes to the opera to hear them scream through 'Lohengrin'--or 'Tannhäuser'--and then one goes into society and talks about Wagner--but it is music like this one enjoys." "Yes, it's rather jolly," said Leonard, staring moodily at his wife, in the act of singing a refrain, of Bé-bé-bé, which was supposed to represent the bleating of an innocent lamb. "And the Baron's voice goes so admirably with Mrs. Tregonell's." "Yes, his voice goes--admirably," said Leonard, sorely tempted to blaspheme.