There was music on the midnight-- From a royal fane it rolled.
The warrior bowed his crested head, and tamed his heart of fire, And sued the haughty king to free his long imprisoned sire.
Mrs. Percy had been a gentle, sentimental, romantic creature with golden ringlets and floating sylph-like form, not unlike Lady Mary's. She received little attention from her scientific husband and devoted her short life to her children and to poetry, writing graceful vacant verses herself. Mrs. Hemans was her favourite poet, although her eyes could kindle when she read "The Corsair," or "The Bride of Arbydos," particularly as she had once met Byron and remembered him as the handsomest of mortals. But she would have thought it indecorous even to mention his name before her young children. Mrs. Hemans was as much a part of the evening hour in winter as the dusk and the blazing logs, and the children loved her almost as well as the gentle being who renewed her girlhood in those romantic effusions. A malignant fever raging up the coast, had burnt out that scene for ever, leaving Anne alone and aghast, for her father, the first horror and remorse over, subsided once more into his laboratory. Then had come a succession of governesses; finally the library was discovered; she ceased to miss her old companions. But she never forgot them, and no doubt the sweetness and melancholy of the memory did as much as the imaginary Byam Warner to save her from the fate of her dry dehumanised father.
Anne came to herself as a charade progressed, and Miss Ogilvy gaily commented upon the interpretation of the middle syllable of Caterpillar, as A, in the architecture of which one of the handsomest girls and her swain made a striking silhouette. Then she remembered that the next name on the programme was Warner's; he was to read for half an hour from his own work; after which all would hie themselves to the music room and dance.
There was a longer interval than usual. Anne's hands and feet became nerveless bits of ice. Had his courage given out? Had he run away? Worse still, was he nerving himself to an ordeal to which he would prove unequal? A humiliating breakdown! Anne's blood pounded through her body as he finally emerged from the curtains, and she broke her fan, much to the amusement of Miss Ogilvy.
The company, although it had once or twice permitted its applause to go beyond the bounds prescribed by elegant civility, had reserved its real enthusiasm for the poet whose halo of present fashion electrified their springs of Christianity. As he entered, correctly attired, although more soberly than most of his audience, and walked slowly to the reading stand, they not only clapped but stamped and cried his name until the walls resounded; and so excited the coloured people (with whom his popularity had never waned) that a stentorian chorus burst through the windows and drowned the more polite if no less ardent greeting of the elect.