"I suppose," said he, "you are one of the charmers."
"Don't ask me what I mean, when you know. If you do that, we shall forget our language."
"Yours and mine. Don't you hear it going on, question and answer, question and answer, all the time our tongues are talking? Those are the things we never can speak out loud."
"Yes, I hear them. But I couldn't tell what I hear."
"Of course you couldn't. Only when we really speak with our lips, we must tell each other the truth. If we don't, we shall jar things. Then the other voices will stop."
When she spoke her words had a note of pain, mysteriously disproportioned, he thought, to the warning he had given.
"I don't think I have told you what wasn't true," she faltered. Life had gone out of her.
The tenderest comforting seemed to him too harsh for such pathetic sorrow. But he clung to his lighter, safer mood.
"We've simply got to tell each other the truth. When we don't, it's like the clanging of ten thousand bells. Of course that drowns the other voices. So when I ask you if you are one of the charmers, you mustn't ask what I mean. You must answer."
She began to laugh. His heart rejoiced at it.
"That's a good lady. You're very beautiful, too, aren't you?"
"Yes," she corroborated. "Oh, I'd swear to anything!"
"If it's true," he corrected her. "What are your accomplishments, missy? Do you play the piano?"
For his life, Osmond could not have told why he addressed her as he did, or how he got the words. Some strange self seemed to have sprung up in him, a self that had a language he had not learned from books nor used to woman. The new self grew rapidly. He felt it wax within him. It was loquacious, too. It seemed to have more to say than there would be time for in a million years; but he gave it head.
"I play a little," said Rose. She was meeting him joyously. "I sing, too."
"Yes, you sing. I guessed that. Let me hear you."
At once she folded her hands on her knees and sang like a child in heaven, with the art that is simplicity. She sang "Nous n'irons plus au bois," and Osmond felt his heart choking with the melancholy of it. His own voice trembled when he said,--
"You must not sing that often. It's too sad."
"Are we never to be sad?" She asked it in a quick tone full of eager confidence, as if whatever he told her was bound to come to pass.