"Unless I heard the whole repeated, I cannot continue it," she said.
"Yet it was quickly learned, 'soon gained, soon gone,'" moralized the tutor. He recited the passage deliberately, accurately, with slow, impressive emphasis.
Shirley, by degrees, inclined her ear as he went on. Her face, before turned from him, returned towards him. When he ceased, she took the word up as if from his lips: she took his very tone; she seized his very accent; she delivered the periods as he had delivered them: she reproduced his manner, his pronunciation, his expression.
It was now her turn to petition.
"Recall 'Le Songe d'Athalie,'" she entreated, "and say it."
He said it for her; she took it from him; she found lively excitement in the pleasure of making his language her own: she asked for further indulgence; all the old school-pieces were revived, and with them Shirley's old school-days.
He had gone through some of the best passages of Racine and Corneille, and then had heard the echo of his own deep tones in the girl's voice, that modulated itself faithfully on his:—"Le Chène et le Roseau," that most beautiful of La Fontaine's fables, had been recited, well recited by the tutor, and the pupil had animatedly availed herself of the lesson. Perhaps a simultaneous feeling seized them now, that their enthusiasm had kindled to a glow, which the slight
