f Joe's
steadiness were not enthusiastic. "You know I should not have been
surprised if you had not come back in a week."

"Fie! fie! Dick Crawford! I have half a mind not to play for you at all,
after that insult." But she did attempt to play, and to play "Las Ojos
Criollos." If she ever could have played that most brilliant and
difficult of all Gottschalk's pieces, which was very doubtful, she
certainly was not capable of doing it when her fingers were in such a
tremor, and with the mysterious package in her pocket; and though it may
be an ungallant and improper thing to say of a lady's performance, she
"made a mess of it."

"Pshaw!" she said, as naturally as if really vexed. "That piece is very
difficult. I thought that I had mastered it, a dozen times, yet here it
is bothering me again. Never mind!--I know what I _can_ play--something
that you like, or if you do not, you should!" And very much to
Crawford's delight, for she did not often sing, though she frequently
_hummed_,--she broke out with voice and instrument into that finest,
though worst-hackneyed, of modern love-ballads--"Ever of Thee." There
are unaccountable fancies, in music as well as in personal regard, and
one piece will sometimes make itself the very key-note of a human heart,
without being in itself so pre-eminently beautiful as to command that
distinction. Crawford had before many times heard Josephine Harris
humming that air, or touching it lightly on the keys of the piano, but
he had never before heard her _sing_ it. Before half of the first stanza
was finished, he knew that it supplied to her a need in music that all
the compositions of all the great masters would fail to fill; and before
she had finished the last, he believed that some painful secret of her
young life must be bound up in it. He was the more painfully confirmed
in that belief, when he saw her rise from the piano the moment after she
had concluded the song, and dash her hand to her eyes with the
unmistakeable gesture of wiping away a tear.

"Joe--dear Joe," he said, "come here a moment."

She crossed the room at once and stood beside him. He held out his hand
to her, and she took it as a sister might have taken that of a dearly
beloved brother. There was nothing of heat or tremor in the touch,
though there was everything of kindness. Absorbed in something else,
both had for the moment forgotten the feeling before predominant--Crawford
his sickness and crippled condition, and