"I'm in such a mood," he told her, "to listen to something rawly and entirely modern!"
"You shall, then," agreed Miss Long, suddenly demure. "D'you know the--er--_Skizzen Macabres_, those deliciously perverse little things of Wedekind's? They've been quite well translated.... Righto, my dear"--in answer to a nervous glance from her sister, "I'll only sing the _primmer_ verses. The music is by that wonderful new Hungarian person--er--Sjambok."
Her tall golden figure reflected itself in the ebony mirror of the piano as Leslie, with a malicious gleam in the tail of her eye, sat down.
"I shan't sing for _him_, all the same," she thought. "I shall sing for Taffy and that Air-boy. I bet I can hit on something that _they'll_ both like.... Yes...."
And she struck the first chords of her accompaniment.
And what was it, this "crudely modern" song that Leslie had chosen for the sake of the two youngest people present at that party?
There is a quintette of banjo-players and harpists who are sometimes "on" at the Coliseum in London, but who are more often touring our Colonies from Capetown to Salter, Sask. And wherever they may go, it seems, they bring down the house with that same song. For, to the hearts of exiled and homesick and middle-aged toilers that simple tune means England, Home and Beauty still. They waltzed to it, long ago in the Nineteenth Century. They "turned over" for some pretty girl who "practised" it. So, when they hear it, they encore it still, with a lump in their throats....
It was the last verse of this song that drifted in Leslie's deep contralto, across this more enlightened drawing-room audience of Nineteen-fourteen. Softly the crooning, simply phrased melody stole out:
"_Even to-day we hear Love's song of yore! Low in our hearts it rings for evermore. Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way, Still we can hear it at the close of day!_"
--"and it's at least as pleasant as any of their beastly 'artistic' music," thought Leslie, rebelliously, as she sang:
"_Still to the end_," (chord) "_while Life's dim shadows fall, Love will be found the sweetest song of all_!"
She ended in a ripple of arpeggios, triumphantly, for she had glanced at the two youngest people in the room. Little Gwenna's eyes were full of the facile tears of her race; and the Dampier boy's face was grave with enjoyment. Alas, for the musical taste of these two! They _had_ liked the old song....