The piano was as far away from the sofa as it could be in so small a room; but Cecil heard a faint sigh as she seated herself in the dusk and laid her hands softly on the keys. How many evenings they two had sat side by side in the same dusk, talking in hushed voices! how often she had felt his warm breath admidst her hair as he bent over her while she sang! But to-day he seemed changed all at once, as he might have changed on the discovery that the woman in whose companionship he had been so unrestrainedly happy was only a scheming coquette after all, and had been spreading an airy net in which to entrap his heart and his fortune. The thought that some chance word of the dowager's might have inspired him with such an idea of her was absolute torture to Cecil Chudleigh. She felt half inclined to refuse to play or sing for the Captain's gratification; and yet to do so might be to make a kind of scene which would seem only a part of her scheme. So after sitting silently for some minutes she touched the keys softly, and began a little reverie of Kalkbrenner's; the simplest of melodies, with a flowing movement like the monotonous plashing of waves rising and falling under the keel of a boat; and then she wandered into a very sweet arrangement of that exquisite air of Beethoven's, "Those evening bells," a melody which Moore has made more exquisite by words whose mournful beauty has never been surpassed by any lyric in our language. "Sing the song, Lady Cecil," said Hector, in a low pleading voice. "Let me hear you sing once more." There was something in his entreating tone--something that seemed like humility, and which reassured Cecil as to his opinion of her. It was not in such a tone that a man would address a woman he had newly learned to despise. If Hector Gordon had been the suppliant of a queen his accent could have been no more reverential than it was. "I am in a very melancholy mood to-night, Lady Cecil," he said, while she paused with her hands straying listlessly over the keys; "and I have a fancy for pensive music. Please let me have the song." "Do you really wish it?" "Really--and truly." What common words they were! and yet how thrilling an accent they took to-night upon _his_ lips! Cecil sang the tender melancholy words in a voice that conveyed all their tenderness--she sang that ballad which in the quiet twilight has so sad a cadence, mournful as the dirge of perished hopes and buried loves. If her low tremulous voice did not break into tears before the end of the song, it was only because, in her nervous terror of any thing like a scene, she exerted all the force of her will to sustain her tones to the close.