white cloth. In its depths, framed in a mat of odorous double
violets, stood the photograph of the face of a handsome man of forty--a
face crowned with clustering black locks, from beneath which a pair of
large, mournful eyes looked out with something like religious fervor in
their rapt gaze. It was the face of a foreigner.

"O Esther!" cried the other girl, "how beautifully you have dressed him
to-day!"

"I wanted to get more," Esther said; "but I've spent almost all my
allowance--and violets do cost so shockingly. Come, now--" with another
glance at the clock--"don't let's lose any more time, Louise dear."

She brought a couple of tiny candles in Sevres candlesticks, and two
little silver saucers, in which she lit fragrant pastilles. As the pale
gray smoke arose, floating in faint wreaths and spirals before the
enshrined photograph, Louise sat down and gazed intently upon the little
altar. Esther went to her piano and watched the clock. It struck two.
Her hands fell softly on the keys, and, studying a printed program in
front of her, she began to play an overture. After the overture she
played one or two pieces of the regular concert stock. Then she paused.

"I can't play the Tschaikowski piece."

"Never mind," said the other. "Let us wait for him in silence."

The hands of the clock pointed to 2:29. Each girl drew a quick breath,
and then the one at the piano began to sing softly, almost inaudibly,
"les Rameaux" in a transcription for tenor of Faure's great song. When
it was ended, she played and sang the _encore_. Then, with her fingers
touching the keys so softly that they awakened only an echo-like sound,
she ran over the numbers that intervened between the first tenor solo
and the second. Then she sang again, as softly as before.

The fair-haired girl sat by the little table, gazing intently on the
picture. Her great eyes seemed to devour it, and yet there was something
absent-minded, speculative, in her steady look. She did not speak until
Esther played the last number on the program.

"He had three encores for that last Saturday," she said, and Esther
played the three encores.

Then they closed the piano and the little cabinet, and exchanged an
innocent girlish kiss, and Louise went out, and found her father's coupe
waiting for her, and was driven away to her great, gloomy, brown-stone
home near Central Park.

Louise Laura Latimer and Esther Van Guilder were the only children of
two families which,