nse longing for the end of
things, and darkness and quiet.

After the meal the company moved into the double parlor. The plan had
been to serve coffee there, but as people stood about waiting and this
did not appear, Paul drew Lydia to one side to ask her about it. She
looked at him with bright, blank eyes, and spoke in an expressionless
voice: "The grocery boy forgot to deliver the coffee," she said. "There
isn't any, I remember now."

He turned away silently, and the later part of the entertainment began.

There was to be music, one of the guests being Endbury's favorite
amateur soprano, another a pianist much thought of. The singer took her
place by the piano, assuming carefully the correct position. Lydia
watched her balance on the balls of her feet, lean forward a little,
throw up her chest and draw in her abdomen. As the preliminary chords of
the accompaniment sounded, she was almost visibly concentrating her
thoughts on the tension of her vocal chords, on the position of the soft
palate and the resonance of the nasal cavities. The thoughts of her
auditors followed her own. It came to Lydia some time after the
performance was over that the words of the song told of love and life
and tragic betrayal.

A near-by guest leaned to her and said, during the hand-clapping: "I
couldn't make out what it was all about--never can understand a
song--but, say! can't she put it all over the soprano that sings in the
First Methodist."

His hostess gave the speaker a rather disconcerting stare, hardly
explained, he thought, by the enigmatical statement that came after it:
"Why, that is how we are living, all of us!"

The pianist was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a
social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American
manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to
play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a
fatherly smile, and, sitting down to his instrument, waited pointedly
until all the cheerful hum of conversation had died away. The room was
profoundly silent as he brought his hands down on the keys in a
startling, thrilling chord. Lydia's heart began to beat fast. She felt a
chill run among the roots of her hair. She was so moved she could have
wept aloud, and yet, almost at once, as the musician passed on to the
rich elaboration of his theme, she lost herself in a groping
bewilderment. She had heard so little music! Her straining