LITMIR.BIZ

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focussed the great, smiling girl.

      "Can she sing?"

      "She has a voice."

      "But have you never let her hear yours?"

      "Once. I had not been here long enough to know better. And I made my usual mistake."

      "What is that?"

      "I thought I had the station to myself."

      The questioner bowed to his rebuke. "Well?" he persisted none the less.

      "I was told exactly what my voice was like, and fit for."

      The gentleman turned on his heel, as though her appreciation of the humor of her position were an annoyance to him. His movement brought him face to face with a photographic galaxy of ladies in varying styles of evening dress, with an equal variety in coiffures, but a certain family likeness running through the series.

      "Are any of these Mrs. Clarkson?"

      "All of them."

      He muttered something in his mustache. "And what's this?" he asked of a sudden.

      The young man (for as such Miss Bouverie was beginning to regard him) was standing under the flaming bill of a grand concert to be given in the township of Yallarook for the benefit of local charities.

      "Oh, that's Mrs. Clarkson's concert," he was informed. "She has been getting it up, and that's why she's had to go to Melbourne—about her dress, you know."

      He smiled sardonically through mustache and monocle.

      "Her charity begins near home!"

      "It need not necessarily end there."

      "Yet she sings five times herself."

      "True—without the encores."

      "And you don't sing at all."

      "But I accompany."

      "A bitter irony! But, I say, what's this? 'Under the distinguished patronage of Sir Julian Crum, Mus. Doc., D.C.L.' Who may he be?"

      "Director of the Royal College of Music, in the old country," the girl answered with a sigh.

      "Royal College of Music? That's something new, since my time," said the visitor, sighing also. "But what's a man like that doing out here?"

      "He has a brother a squatter, the next station but one. Sir Julian's spending the English winter with him on account of his health."

      "So you've seen something of him?"

      "I wish we had."

      "But Mrs. Clarkson has?"

      "No—not yet."

      "I see!" and an enlightened gleam shot through the eye-glass. "So this is her way of getting to know a poor overworked wreck who came out to patch his lungs in peace and quiet! And she's going to sing him one of his own songs; she's gone to Melbourne to dress the part; and you're not going to sing anything at all!"

      Miss Bouverie refrained alike from comment and confirmation; but her silence was the less creditable in that her companion was now communing chiefly with himself. She felt, indeed, that she had already been guilty of a certain disloyalty to one to whom she owed some manner of allegiance; but that was the extent of Miss Bouverie's indiscretion in her own eyes. It caused her no qualms to entertain an anonymous gentleman whom she had never seen before. A colder course had commended itself to the young lady fresh from London; but to a Colonial girl, on a station where special provision was made for the entertaining of strange travellers, the situation was simply conventional. It might have been less onerous with host or hostess on the spot; but then the visitor would not have heard her sing, and he seemed to know what singing was.

      Miss Bouverie watched him as he leant over the piano, looking through the songs which she had dared once more to bring forth from her room. She might well have taken a romantic interest in the dark and dapper man, with the military eye-glass and mustache, the spruce duck jacket and the spurred top-boots. It was her first meeting with such a type in the back-blocks of New South Wales. The gallant ease, the natural gayety, the charming manners that charmed no less for a clear trace of mannerism, were a peculiar refreshment after society racier of Riverina soil. Yet it was none of these things which attracted this woman to this man; for the susceptible girl was dead in her for the time being; but the desperate artist was alive again after many weeks, was panting for fresh life, was catching at a straw. He had heard her sing. It had brought him galloping off the track. He praised her voice; and he knew—he knew what singing was.

      Who could he be? Not . . . could that be possible?

      "Sing me this," he said, suddenly, and, seating himself at the piano, played the opening bars of a vocal adaptation of Handel's Largo with a just, though unpractised, touch.

      Nothing could have afforded a finer hearing of the quality and the compass of her voice, and she knew of old how well it suited her; yet at the outset, from the sheer excitement of her suspicion, Hilda Bouverie was shaky to the point of a pronounced tremolo. It wore off with the lengthening cadences, and in a minute the little building was bursting with her voice, while the pianist swayed and bent upon his stool with the exuberant sympathy of a brother in art. And when the last rich note had died away he wheeled about, and so sat silent for many moments, looking curiously on her flushed face and panting bosom.

      "I can't place your voice," he said, at last. "It's both voices—the most wonderful compass in the world—and the world will tell you so, when you go back to it, as go back you must and shall. May I ask the name of your master?"

      "My own name—Bouverie. It was my father. He is dead."

      Her eyes glistened.

      "You did not go to another?"

      "I had no money. Besides, he had lived for what you say; when he died with his dream still a dream, I said I would do the same, and I came up here."

      She had turned away. A less tactful interlocutor had sought plainer repudiation of the rash resolve; this one rose and buried himself in more songs.

      "I have heard you in Grand Opera, and in something really grand," he said. "Now I want a song, the simpler the better."

      Behind his back a daring light came into the moist eyes.

      "There is one of Mrs. Clarkson's," she said. "She would never forgive me for singing it, but I have heard it from her so often, I know so well how it ought to go."

      And, fetching the song from a cabinet, she thrust it boldly under his nose. It was called "The Unrealized Ideal," and was a setting of some words by a real poet then living, whose name caused this reader to murmur, "London Lyrics!" The composer was Sir Julian Crum. But his name was read without a word, or a movement of the strong shoulders and the tanned neck on which Miss Bouverie's eyes were fixed.

      "You had better play this yourself," said he, after peering at the music through his glass. "It is rather too many for me."

      And, strangely crestfallen, Miss Bouverie took his place.

      "My only love is always near,—

       In country or in town

       I see her twinkling feet, I hear

       The whisper of her gown.

      "She foots it, ever fair and young,

       Her locks are tied in haste,

       And one is o'er her shoulder flung

       And hangs below her waist."

      For that was the immortal trifle. How much of its immortality it will owe to the setting of Sir Julian Crum is a matter of opinion, but here is an anonymous view.

      "I like the words, Miss Bouverie, but the setting doesn't take me. It might with repetition. It seems lacking in go and simplicity; technically, I should say, a gem. But there can be no two opinions of your singing of such a song; that's the sort of arrow to go straight to the heart of the public—a

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