ecognized the accents of an unfathomable
appreciation in that simple exclamation, and struck into a grand old
battle-song that had always made his own heart beat with something of
the fire of ancient chivalry under its breastplate of modern broadcloth.

"It is the voice of the thunder clouds when they marshal for battle!"
exclaimed she at the conclusion. "I can hear the cry of a righteous
struggle all through the sublime harmony."

"You are right; it is a war-song ancient as the time of battle-axes and
spears," quoth Bertram from his seat at the piano.

"I thought I detected the flashing of steel," returned she. "O what a
world lies in those simple bits of ivory!"

"Say rather in the fingers that sweep them," uttered Mr. Sylvester. "You
will not hear such music often."

"I am glad of that," she cried simply, then in a quick conscious tone
explained, "I mean that the hearing of such music makes an era in our
life, a starting-point for thoughts that reach away into eternity; we
could not bear such experiences often, it would confuse the spirit if
not deaden its enjoyment. Or so it seems to me," she added naively,
glancing at her cousin who now came sweeping in from the further room,
where she had been trying the effect of a change in the arrangement of
two little pet monstrosities of Japanese ware.

"What seems to you?" that lady inquired. "O, Mr. Mandeville's playing? I
beg pardon, Sylvester is the name by which you now wish to be addressed
I suppose. Fine, isn't it?" she rambled on all in the same tone while
she cautiously hid an unfortunate gape of her rosy mouth behind the
folds of her airy handkerchief. "Mr. Turner says the hiatus you have
made in the musical world by leaving the concert room for the desk, can
never be repaired," she went on, supposedly to her nephew though she did
not look his way, being at that instant engaged in sinking into her
favorite chair.

"I am glad," Bertram politely returned with a frank smile, "to have
enjoyed the approval of so cultivated a critic as Mr. Turner. I own it
occasions me a pang now and then," he remarked to his uncle over his
shoulder, "to think I shall never again call up those looks of
self-forgetful delight, which I have sometimes detected on the faces of
certain ones in my audience."

And he relapsed without pause into a solemn anthem, the very reverse of
the stirring tones which he had previously accorded them.

"Now we are in a temple!" whispered Paula, subd