Under these cheerless circumstances our pair of companions—­for as yet they were, ostensibly at any rate, nothing more—­gave up their outdoor excursions and took to rambling over the disused rooms in the old house, and hunting up many a record, some of them valuable and curious enough, of long-forgotten Caresfoots, and even of the old priors before them; a splendidly illuminated missal being amongst the latter prizes.  When this amusement was exhausted, they sat together over the fire in the nursery, and Angela translated to him from her favourite classical authors, especially Homer, with an ease and fluency of expression that, to Arthur, was little short of miraculous.  Or, when they got tired of that, he read to her from standard writers, which, elaborate as her education had been, in certain respects, she had scarcely yet even opened, notably Shakespeare and Milton.  Needless to say, herself imbued with a strong poetic feeling, these immortal writers were a source of intense delight to her.

“How is it that Mr. Fraser never gave you Shakespeare to read?” asked Arthur one day, as he shut up the volume, having come to the end of “Hamlet.”

“He said that I should be better able to appreciate it when my mind had been prepared to do so by the help of a classical and mathematical education, and that it would be ’a mistake to cloy my mental palate with sweets before I had learnt to appreciate their flavours.’”

“There is some sense in that,” remarked Arthur.  “By the way, how are the verses you promised to write me getting on?  Have you done them yet?”

“I have done something,” she answered, modestly, “but I really do not think that they are worth producing.  It is very tiresome of you to have remembered about them.”

Arthur, however, by this time knew enough of Angela’s abilities to be sure that her “something” would be something more or less worth hearing, and mildly insisted on their production, and then, to her confusion, on her reading them aloud.  They ran as follows, and whatever Angela’s opinion of them may have been, the reader shall judge of them for himself: 

A STORM ON THE STRINGS

“The minstrel sat in his lonely room,
Its walls were bare, and the twilight grey
Fell and crept and gathered to gloom;
It came like the ghost of the dying day,
And the chords fell hushed and low. 

          
                                                                              Pianissimo!

“His arm was raised, and the violin
Quivered and shook with the strain it bore,
While the swelling forth of the sounds within
Rose with a sweetness unknown before,
And the chords fell soft and low. 

          
                                                                              Piano!

“The first cold flap of the tempest’s wings
Clashed with the silence before the storm,
The raindrops pattered across the strings
As the gathering thunder-clouds took form—­
Drip, drop, high and low. 

                                                                                        Staccato!