fare--hot chocolate and creamed potatoes and apple sauce,
and its brisk, impersonal talk of socialism, and politics, and small
home events, and music. As it happened, the quartet had the lack of
intuition to play a great deal of Haydn that autumn, and to Sylvia
the cheerful, obvious tap-tap-tap of the hearty old master seemed to
typify the bald, unsubtle obtuseness of the home attitude towards
life. She herself took to playing the less difficult of the Chopin
nocturnes with a languorous over-accentuation of their softness which
she was careful to keep from the ears of old Reinhardt. But one
evening he came in, unheard, listened to her performance of the B-flat
minor nocturne with a frown, and pulled her away from the piano before
she had finished. "Not true music, not true love, not true anydings!"
he said, speaking however with an unexpected gentleness, and patting
her on the shoulder with a dirty old hand. "Listen!" He clapped his
fiddle under his chin and played the air of the andante from the
Kreutzer Sonata with so singing and heavenly a tone that Sylvia, as
helpless an instrument in his skilful hands as the violin itself, felt
the nervous tears stinging her eyelids.

This did not prevent her making a long detour the next day to avoid
meeting the uncomely old musician on the street and being obliged to
recognize him publicly. She lived in perpetual dread of being thus
forced, when in the company of Mrs. Draper or Jermain, to acknowledge
her connection with him, or with Cousin Parnelia, or with any of
the eccentrics who frequented her parents' home, and whom it was
physically impossible to imagine drinking tea at Mrs. Draper's table.

It was beside this same table that she met, one day in early December,
Jermain Fiske's distinguished father. He explained that he was in La
Chance for a day on his way from Washington to Mercerton, where the
Fiske family was collecting for its annual Christmas house-party, and
had dropped in on Mrs. Draper quite unexpectedly. He was, he added,
delighted that it happened to be a day when he could meet the lovely
Miss Marshall of whom (with a heavy accent of jocose significance)
he had heard so much. Sylvia was a little confused by the pointed
attentions of this gallant old warrior, oddly in contrast with the
manner of other elderly men she knew; but she thought him very
handsome, with his sweeping white mustache, his bright blue eyes,
so like his son's, and she was much impressed with