No one would have accused Stella of not being a well-bred young
woman, yet she sat, Mark noted, carelessly and not quite gracefully.
Miss Allison Clyde was taller than Stella, yet she was adjusted to her
chair with a disciplined grace and dignity far removed from stiffness.

"Stella has promised to sing 'Crabbed Age' for me again," she announced
when tea was finished.

"Shall I sing it now?" Stella rose with her promptness, and, going to
the piano, plunged at once into the opening bars. Although the composer
was not an egoist, he shuddered.

"I am making frightful hash of it, I know," Stella confessed, unabashed,
as her fingers stumbled. "I think Miss Allison had better play it." Mark
glanced quickly at the older woman.

"Then it was _you_ I heard a moment ago."

"I tried it," she admitted, with a smile. "The title had a melancholy
attraction for me. I had no idea the composer was overhearing, or I
should have had stage-fright dreadfully."

"Play something else," Mark suggested. "It would give me so much
pleasure. Something _not_ Mark Faraday."

Miss Allison rose decisively.

"No, I will play 'Crabbed Age,'" she decided, "and youth shall sing
it." And then they ran through it together, the older woman playing it
with a musician's sense of its qualities, and Stella singing it through
passably in her firm young voice.

In answer to Mark's sincere, "Play more," as she started to rise from
the piano stool, Miss Allison let her fingers wander through passages
of "Meistersinger" in a way that showed a musician's knowledge of the
score.

"How wonderful that you can play like that still!" exclaimed Stella.
The gaucherie of that "still" struck upon Mark's artistic sensibilities,
trained in Italian habits of speech. "What a resource it must be!"

"For crabbed age," Miss Allison finished. Her smile held a faint
amusement. Stella, momentarily silenced, if not abashed, by this
explicit voicing of her thought, did not contradict, and Miss Allison
continued, "The technic of a Paderewski would be small compensation
for lost youth, I fear." She said it without sentimentality, but, as
she spoke, lightly touched the delicate theme of the "Golden Apples"
that brought eternal youth to the gods, passing into the sublimity of
the Valhalla motive. Looking up, she met Mark's comprehension and
smiled, then, bringing her chord to a resolution, rose from the piano
stool. Mark watched her as she paused to turn over the pages of his