opened upon a street beyond, there was a little child leaning over to
look at some soldiers that were passing through the street across the
alley. He was supporting himself, by an iron wire that served as a
lightning-rod. Already it was bending beneath his weight; and in his
eagerness he was forgetting his slippery footing, and the dizzy height of
thirty feet, over which he was hanging. He was a little three year-old
fellow, too, and probably never knew anything about danger. His mother had
always screamed as loudly when he fell from a footstool as when she had
seen him leaning from a three-story window.

The voice came from a girl, who, at the moment Arnold came to the window,
was crossing the iron palisade of the piazza. She was on the slippery,
sloping leads as she repeated the cry, in a tone earnest and
thrilling,--"Dear Arnold, come in, only come, and George shall take you to
the soldiers."

The boy only gave another start of pleasure, that seemed to loosen still
more his support, crying out, "The drummer! Cousin Laura, come, see the
drummer!"

But Laura kept her way along the edge of the roof, reached the child,
seized him, and walked back across the perilous slope with the struggling
boy in her arms. Arnold the musician had noticed, even in her hurrying,
dangerous passage towards the child, the rich sunny folds of her hair,
golden like a German girl's. Now, as she returned, he saw the soft lines
of her terror-moved face, and the deep blue of her wide-opened eyes. Her
voice changed as she reached the piazza, and set the child down in safety.

"Oh, Arnold, darling, how could you, how could you frighten me so?"

The child began to cry, because it was reproved, because its pleasure was
stopped, and because Cousin Laura, pale and white, held to the railing of
the piazza for support. But the mamma came out, Laura was lifted in, the
boy was scolded, the windows were shut, and there was the end.

Arnold sat by the window, thinking. The thrilling tones of the voice still
rang in his ear, as though they were calling upon him, "Arnold, come, come
back!"

"If any voice would speak to me in that tone!" he thought; "if such a
voice would call upon my name with all that heart in its depths!"

And he compared it with the tone in which Caroline had appealed to him the
day before. Sometimes her voice assumed the same earnestness, and he felt
as if she were showing him in the words all her own heart, betraying love,
warmth