pay so much attention to Mademoiselle Servin's performance.

"O yes," murmured the Englishwoman, "I like such music as that."

"And you, too, think that Beethoven never composed simple plaintive
airs--for example," exclaimed the pianist, playing softly while she
spoke. "You think he wrote only sonatas, quartettes, fugues, grand,
operas, like _Fidelio_. Have you never heard this by your scientific
Beethoven?"

Hereupon she played "Hope told a flattering tale," with much tenderness
and delicacy. Her two hearers listened, mute and deeply moved. And then
from that familiar melody she glided softly into another, most musical,
most melancholy, which has been set to some of the sweetest verses that
Thomas Moore ever composed:

"Those evening bells, those evening bells!
How many a tale their music tells
Of youth and home, and that sweet time
When last I heard their soothing chime!"

All the world sang the verses of Ireland's divine bard in those days. The
song was one which the Englishwoman had sung years ago in a happy home.
What recollections, what associations, were evoked by that plaintive
melody, who shall say? The words came back with the music to which they
have been eternally wedded. The words, their mournful meaning, the faces
of the friends amongst whom she had last sung them, the picture of the
peaceful home whose walls had echoed the music,--all these things arose
before her in a vision too painfully vivid; and the lonely boarder at the
Pension Magnotte covered her face with her hands, and sobbed aloud.