won't bother you much, father dear--"

"You _will_ bother me much," he retorted. "I propose to be
bothered--bothered a lot! I'm going to look up this fellow Sloane--"

"But let's leave him alone for to-day." She bent over her father
compassionately. "What a night you must have had, poor dear." Roger looked
up in grim reproach.

"You like all this," he grunted. "You, a grown woman, a teacher too."

"I wonder if I do," she said. "I guess I'm a queer person, dad, a curious
family mixture--of Laura and Edith and mother and you, with a good deal of
myself thrown in. But it feels rather good to be mixed, don't you think?
Let's stay mixed as long as we can--and keep together the family."

* * * * *

That afternoon, to distract him, Deborah took her father to a concert in
Carnegie Hall. She had often urged him to go of late, but despite his
liking for music Roger had refused before, simply because it was a change.
But why balk at going anywhere now, when Laura was up to such antics at
home?

"Do you mind climbing up to the gallery?" Deborah asked as they entered the
hall.

"Not at all," he curtly answered. He did mind it very much!

"Then we'll go to the very top," she said. "It's a long climb but I want
you to see it. It's so different up there."

"I don't doubt it," he replied. And as they made the slow ascent, pettishly
he wondered why Deborah must always be so eager for queer places.
Galleries, zoo schools, tenement slums--why not take a two dollar seat in
life?

Deborah seated him far down in the front of the great gallery, over at the
extreme right, and from here they could look back and up at a huge dim
arena of faces.

"Now watch them close," she whispered. "See what the music does to them."

As the symphony began below the faces all grew motionless. And as the music
cast its spell, the anxious ruffled feelings which had been with Roger all
that day little by little were dispelled, and soon his imagination began to
work upon this scene. He saw many familiar American types. He felt he knew
what they had been doing on Sundays only a few years before. After church
they had eaten large Sunday dinners. Then some had napped and some had
walked and some had gone to Sunday school. At night they had had cold
suppers, and afterwards some had gone back to church; while others, as in
Roger's house in the days when Judith was alive, had gathered around the
piano for hymns. Young men cal