“Who would care to go back to earth, and parlors?” said Georgie. “This is Arcadia--silent, odorous, and sweet. Let us stay, Lisbeth.”
So they sauntered here and there until they were tired, and then they found a resting-place, under a laburnum tree; and Anstruthers, flinging himself upon the grass, lay at full length, his hands clasped under his head, watching Lisbeth, in newly stirred bitterness and discontent.
Discontent? Ah! what discontent it was. What bitterness! To-night it reached its climax. Was he a man, indeed, or had he gone back to boyhood, and to that old folly upon which his youth had been wrecked? Moonlight was very becoming to Lisbeth. It gave her colorless face the white of a lily leaf, and her great eyes a new depth and shadow. She looked her best, just now, as she had a habit of looking her best, at all inopportune and dangerous times.
Georgie, leaning, in a luxury of quiet dreaming, against the trunk of the laburnum, broke in upon his mental plaints, by speaking to her friend.
“Sing, Lisbeth,” she said. “You look as if you were in a singing mood.”
Lisbeth smiled, a faint smile not unlike moonlight. She was in a singing mood, but she was in a fantastic, half-melancholy mood, too. Perhaps this was why she chose a rather melancholy song. She folded her hands upon her knees, in that favorite fashion of hers, the fashion Anstruthers remembered so well, and began;
“All that I had to give I gave-- Good-by! Yet Love lies silent in the grave, And that I lose, which most I crave, Good-by! Good-by! Good-by!
“Nay! turn your burning eyes away! Good-by! It comes to this--this bitter day, That you and I can only say, Good-by! Good-by! Good-by!
“The rest lies buried with the past! Good-by! The golden days, that sped so fast, The golden days, too bright to last; Good-by! Good-by! Good-by!
“The fairest rose blooms but a day, Good-by! The fairest Spring must end with May, And you and I can only say, Good-by! Good-by! Good-by!”
“Ah, Lisbeth!” cried Georgie, when she stopped. “What a sad thing! I never heard you sing it before.”
“No,” answered Lisbeth. “I don’t think anybody ever heard me sing it before. It is an imitation of a little German song I have heard, or read, somewhere. I can’t remember where, indeed. I can remember nothing but that the refrain of ‘Good-by’ haunted me; and the words I have just sung grew out of it.”