The warm colour
flushed her cheeks--the lustre brightened in her eyes, and she
looked sweeter and more bewitching than ever as she loosened the
rich sables from about her slim throat, and drawing off her gloves
sat down to the piano. Florian Varillo lounged near her--she saw him
not at all,--Angela came up to ask if she could play an
accompaniment for her,--but she shook her bright head in a smiling
negative, and her small white fingers running over the keys, played
a rippling passage of a few bars while she raised her clear eyes to
Aubrey and asked him,--
"Do you know an old Brittany song called 'Le Palais D'Iffry'? No? It
is just one of those many songs of the unattainable,--the search for
the 'Fortunate Isles', or the 'Fata Morgana' of happiness."
"Is happiness nothing but a 'Fata Morgana'?'" asked Aubrey gently,
"Must it always vanish when just in sight?"
His eyes grew darkly passionate as he spoke, and again Sylvie's
heart beat high, but she did not answer in words,--softening the
notes of her prelude she sang in a rich mezzo-soprano, whose
thrilling tone penetrated to every part of the room, the quaint old
Breton ballad,
"Il serait un roi! Mais quelqu'un a dit, 'Non!--Pas pour toi! 'Reste
en prison,--ecoute le chant d'amour, 'Et le doux son des baisers que
la Reine a promit 'A celui qui monte, sans peur et sans retour Au
Palais D'Iffry!' Helas, mon ami, C'est triste d'ecouter le chanson
sans le chanter aussi!"
Aubrey listened to the sweet far-reaching notes--"Sans peur, et sans
retour, au Palais D'Iffry"! Thither would he climb--to that
enchanted palace of love with its rainbow towers glittering in the
"light that never was on sea or land"--to the throne of that queen
whose soft eyes beckoned him--whose kiss waited for him--everything
now must be for her--all the world for her sake, willingly lost or
willingly won! And what of the work he had undertaken? The people to
whom he had pledged his life? The great Christ-message he had
determined to re-preach for the comfort of the million lost and
sorrowful? His brows contracted,--and a sudden shadow of pain
clouded the frank clearness of his eyes.
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