Hester's sole answer was a smile, in which, and I am afraid it was really there, Vavasor read contempt, and liked her none the worse for it. Cornelius turned in offense, went back to the piano, and sang the song again--not one hair better--in just the same nerveless, indifferent fashion as before; for how shall one who has no soul, put soul into a song? Mrs. Raymount was sitting at the fireside with her embroidery. She had not spoken since tea, but now she called Hester, and said to her quietly-- "Don't provoke him, Hester. I am more than delighted to find he has begun to take an interest in music. It is a taste that will grow upon him. Coax him to let you teach him--and bear with him if he should sing out of tune.--It is nothing wicked!" she added with a mother-smile. Hester was silent. Her conscience rebuked her more than her heart. She went up to him and said-- "Corney, dear, let me find you a song worth singing." "A girl can't choose for a man. You're sure to fix on some sentimental stuff or other not fit to sing!" "My goodness, Corney!" cried Hester, "what do you call the song you've just been singing?" In the days when my heart was aching Like the shell of an overtuned lyre. "Ha! ha! ha!" She laughed prettily, not scornfully, then striking an attitude of the mock heroic, added, on the spur of the moment-- "And the oven was burning, not baking, The tarts of my soul's desire!" --for at the moment one of those fumes the kitchen was constantly firing at the drawing-room, came storming up as if a door had been suddenly opened in yet lower regions. Cornelius was too much offended and self-occupied to be amused, but both Mrs. Raymount and Vavasor laughed, the latter recognizing in Hester's extemporization a vein similar to his own. But Hester was already searching, and presently found a song to her mind--one, that was, fit for Cornelius. "Come now, Corney," she said; "here is a song I should like you to be able to sing!" With that she turned to the keys, and sang a spirited ballad, of which the following was the first stanza: This blow is for my brother: You lied away his life; This for his weeping mother, This for your own sweet wife; For you told that lie of another To pierce her heart with its knife. And now indeed the singer was manifest; genius was plainly the soul of her art, and her art the obedient body to the informing genius. Vavasor was utterly enchanted, but too world-eaten to recognize the soul she almost waked in him for any other than the old one. Her mother thought she had never heard her sing so splendidly before. The ballad was of a battle between two knights, a good and a bad--something like Browning's _Count Gismond_: the last two lines of it were-- So the lie went up in the face of heaven And melted in the sun.