k his leave.

He had no sooner reached his own room than he reproached himself for his
sudden retreat. Why had he not stayed, and tried to persuade the young
lady to change her mind? An engagement for the theatre with a cousin might
have been easily postponed. And he would like to have made her listen to
some of his music. He would have compelled her to listen. He would have
played something that would have stirred all the audience; but for her, it
would have been like taking her back to her peril of the day before,--she
should have lived over again all its self-exaltation, all its triumph.

Laura meanwhile had laid down her work.

"I was stupid," she said, "not to take that ticket."

"I think you were," said her aunt, "when we know so many people who would
give their skins for a ticket."

"It is not that," said Laura; "but I didn't want to go, till I saw the
ticket going out of my grasp. I have always had such dreary associations
with concerts, since those I went to with Janet, last spring,--long,
dreary pieces that I couldn't understand, interrupted by Italian songs
that had more scream in them than music, and Janet flirting with her
friends all the time."

"I knew you didn't like music," said her aunt; "that was the only way I
could get you out of the scrape, for it did seem impolite to refuse the
ticket. Of course an engagement to the theatre appeared a mere excuse, as
long as Laura Keene plays every night now."

"It was not a mere excuse with me," said Laura; "I did not fancy the
exchange. But now I think I should like to know what _his_ music is. I
wonder if it is at all like mine."

"The music you make on the little old piano at home?" asked Mrs. Ashton;
"that is sweet enough in that room, but I fancy it is different from his
music."

"Oh, I don't mean that," said Laura; "it is because the piano seems to say
so little that I care so little for it. The music I mean is what I hear,
when, in a summer's afternoon, I carry my book out into the barn to read
as I lie on a bed of hay. I don't read, but I listen. The cooing of the
doves, the clatter even of the fowls in the barn-yard, the quiet noises,
with the whisperings of the great elm, and the rustling of the brook in
the field beyond,--all this is the music I like to hear. It puts me into
delicious dreams, and stirs me, too, into strange longing."

"Well, I doubt if our great musician can do all that. Anyhow, he wouldn't
bring in the hens and chickens," l