Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the table
where she was standing sorting the papers.
"Look!" she said, "these are all poems by Christopher Lovelock"; and
touching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent fingers, she
commenced reading some of them out loud in a slow, half-audible voice. They
were songs in the style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton,
complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady called Dryope, in
whose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of the mistress of
Okehurst. The songs were graceful, and not without a certain faded passion:
but I was thinking not of them, but of the woman who was reading them to
me.
Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish yellow wall as a background to her
white brocade dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make, seemed
but to bring out more clearly the slightness, the exquisite suppleness, of
her tall figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the other, as
if for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. Her voice, which was
delicate, shadowy, like her person, had a curious throbbing cadence, as if
she were reading the words of a melody, and restraining herself with
difficulty from singing it; and as she read, her long slender throat
throbbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin face.
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