“I must admit that I found it a little annoying, after what we’d been talking about at dinner an hour before, that Rangon wasn’t with us.  I still couldn’t understand how he could have neighbours so charming without knowing about them, but I didn’t care to insist on this to the old lady, who for all I knew might have her own reasons for keeping to herself.  And, after all, it was our place to return Rangon’s hospitality in London if he ever came there, not, so to speak, on his own doorstep....  So presently I forgot all about Rangon, and I’m pretty sure that Carroll, who was talking to his companion of some Felibrige junketing or other and having the air of Gounod’s Mireille hummed softly over to him, didn’t waste a thought on him either.  Soon Carroll—­you remember what a pretty crooning, humming voice he had—­soon Carroll was murmuring what they call ‘seconds,’ but so low that the sound hardly came across the room; and I came in with a soft bass note from time to time.  No instrument, you know; just an unaccompanied murmur no louder than an Aeolian harp; and it sounded infinitely sweet and plaintive and—­what shall I say?—­weak—­attenuated—­faint—­’pale’ you might almost say—­in that formal, rather old-fashioned salon, with that great clear oval mirror throwing back the still flames of the candles in the sconces on the walls.  Outside the wind had now fallen completely; all was very quiet; and suddenly in a voice not much louder than a sigh, Carroll’s companion was singing Oft in the Stilly Night—­you know it....”

He broke off again to murmur the beginning of the air.  Then, with a little laugh for which we saw no reason, he went on again: 

“Well, I’m not going to try to convince you of such a special and delicate thing as the charm of that hour—­it wasn’t more than an hour—­it would be all about an hour we stayed.  Things like that just have to be said and left; you destroy them the moment you begin to insist on them; we’ve every one of us had experiences like that, and don’t say much about them.  I was as much in love with my old lady as Carroll evidently was with his young one—­I can’t tell you why—­being in love has just to be taken for granted too, I suppose...  Marsham understands....  We smoked our cigarettes, and sang again, once more filling that clear-painted, quiet apartment with a murmuring no louder than if a light breeze found that the bells of a bed of flowers were really bells and played on ’em.  The old lady moved her fingers gently on the round table by the side of her chair,.. oh, infinitely pretty it was....  Then Carroll wandered off into the Que Cantes—­awfully pretty—­’It is not for myself I sing, but for my friend who is near me’—­and I can’t tell you how like four old friends we were, those two so oddly met ladies and Carroll and myself....  And so to Oft in the Stilly Night again....