“My dear child!” with a deeply horrified air. “How can you talk in such a wild way? Captain Waring is shocked--ain’t you, captain?” “Dreadfully scandalized; and I will only condone the outrage to my feelings on one condition, that Miss Gordon plays us a solo. Will you, Miss Gordon? This is the hour and the place.” Mrs. Brande naturally expected that her niece would require at least a quarter of an hour’s incessant pressing; and, indeed, in spite of what the Hodsons had told her, this benighted old person was not at all sure that it was the correct thing for a woman to play the fiddle. “Would Mrs. Langrishe allow her girl to do it?” and visions of her own fat black butler, squatting outside the house in the cool of the day playing jigs and reels to a circle of enraptured syces and chuprassis, rose before her mind’s eye! This vision was quickly dispelled by another. Honor longed for the sound of her beloved violin, her present audience were not formidable, and she was not the least nervous. Last time she had held her fiddle and bow it had been a dull wet afternoon at home--a type of the worst grey, sullen, English weather. She had played to them in the drawing-room Schubert’s “Adieu.” Yes, and her mother had wept. Now, what a different scene, and different listeners! Two men, almost strangers, prone on the grass, lazily expectant, and, as far as Captain Waring was concerned, condescendingly ready to be entertained; a stout lady sitting on a wine-case, with her napkin on her knee, and her topee quite at the back of her head; a distant group of scarlet-and-white clad servants; and all around a scene fit to encircle Orpheus himself. Range after range of purple-blue hills, rising out of rhododendron and oak forests, a rival across the valley in the shape of a cuckoo, otherwise a waiting, sympathetic silence. As the girl took the violin out of its case, Captain Waring could see that it was in hands that loved it; and noted, moreover, that the said hands were beautiful--the wrists most daintily modelled. Soon the bow began to call forth heavenly sounds. Honor stood up, leaning carelessly against the trunk of a tree, and seemed wholly unconscious of her audience; her face, which was turned towards the hills, gradually assumed a rapt exalted expression, and her playing was in keeping with her attitude and her eyes. The performance was a revelation--a mixture of great simplicity, with a distinct note of human passion in its strain. Surely the music was the voice of this girl’s sweet soul! The servants boldly came near to hear this new “Miss Sahib” who drew such marvellous strains from the “sitar.” The very ponies pricked their ears, a rambling hill cow halted to listen, the competitive cuckoo was dumb.