again. She also
shrugged her shoulder; she was not quite ready yet to be tapped and
patted.

"But don't remain standing, child," Mrs. Bates proceeded, genially.
She motioned Jane back to her chair, and herself advanced to the
roomier sofa. "Or no; this little pen is like a refrigerator to-day;
it's so hard, every fall, to get the steam heat running as it should.
Come, it ought to be warmer in the music-room."

"The fact is," she proceeded, as they passed through the hall, "that I
have a spare hour on my hands this morning--the first in a month. My
music teacher has just sent word that she is down with a cold. You
shall have as much of that hour as you wish. So tell me all about your
plans; I dare say I can scrape together a few pennies for Jane
Marshall."

"Her music teacher!" thought Jane. She was not yet so far appeased nor
so far forgetful of her own initial awkwardness as to refrain from
searching out the joints in the other's armor. "What does a woman of
fifty-five want to be taking music lessons for?"

The music-room was a lofty and spacious apartment done completely in
hard-woods; its paneled walls and ceilings rang with a magnificent
sonority as the two pairs of feet moved across the mirror-like
marquetry of the floor.

To one side stood a concert-grand; its case was so unique and so
luxurious that even Jane was conscious of its having been made by
special order and from a special design. Close at hand stood a tall
music-stand in style to correspond. It was laden with handsomely bound
scores of all the German classics and the usual operas of the French
and Italian schools. These were all ranged in precise order; nothing
there seemed to have been disturbed for a year past. "My! isn't it
grand!" sighed Jane. She already felt herself succumbing beneath these
accumulated splendors.

Mrs. Bates carelessly seated herself on the piano stool, with her back
to the instrument. "I don't suppose," she observed, casually, "that I
have sat down here for a month."

"What!" cried Jane, with a stare. "If I had such a lovely room as this
I should play in it every day."

"Dear me," rejoined Mrs. Bates, "what pleasure could I get from
practicing in this great barn of a place, that isn't half full until
you've got seventy or eighty people in it? Or on this big sprawling
thing?"--thrusting out her elbow backward towards the shimmering cover
of the keyboard.

"So then," said Jane to herself, "it's all for show. I knew it