left his family at Newport after the season was over. I was
to meet him there when we went down, and hear his decision on the score.
I met him one day on Broadway, and hinted my vague desire of making my
voice also available.

"To sing? did you say sing, Mrs. Manning? go on the stage?"--pawing his
chin with one hand.

He was a short, puffy little man, with a bullet head at half-cock in the
air, producing a general effect of nostrils on you.

"Sing, eh?" he mumbled, once or twice.

Before this I had been Mrs. Manning, throwing off an opera-score as a
careless whim, one of the class to whom he and his like presented arms:
he surveyed me now with the eye of a stock-raiser buying a new mule, and
set the next evening as the time when I should "drop in at his house
and give him a trill or two.--Keeping dark before the old man yet, eh?"
with a wink. I went in the next day, but he declined to pronounce
judgment until we came to Newport.

I remember my husband met me at the gate when I returned, and lifted me
from the little pony-carriage.

"I'm so glad my girl is taking her drives again,"--his face in a
glow,--"coming back with the old red cheeks, too. They're a sort of hint
of all the good years coming. We're far off from being old people yet,
Hetty." And so went beside me slowly up the garden-walk, his hands
clasped behind him, stopping to look now and then at his favorite purple
and crimson hollyhocks.

I looked at him askance, as we went through the evening shadows. There
was something grand in the quiet of the face, growing old with the depth
of sadness and endurance subdued in it: the kindly smile over all. I had
brought the smile there. But it would not be for long: and I remember
how the stalk of gillyflower I held snapped in my hand, and its spicy
odor made me throw it down. I have loathed it ever since. Was my life to
be wasted in calling a smile to an old man's face? My husband and M.
Vaux were different men; but, on the other side, they were gates to me
of different lives: here, a sordid slavery of work; there,--something in
me glowed warm and triumphant,--fame and an accomplished deed in life!

Surely these mawkish home-ties were fast loosing their hold on me, I
thought, as we went in. I asked no questions as to my husband's plans;
no one spoke to me of them. In the few days before our departure I roped
up chairs, packed china in straw, sorted clothes into trunks, working
harder than the others, and then