THE STOLEN SINGER

BY

MARTHA BELLINGER

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT 1911

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

TO

MY HUSBAND

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE STOLEN SINGER

CHAPTER I

TWILIGHT IN THE PARK

"You may wait, Renaud."

The voice was firm, but the lady herself hesitated as she stepped from the tonneau. There was no answer. Holding the flapping ends of her veil away from her face, she turned and looked fairly at the driver of the machine.

He seemed a businesslike, capable man, though certain minor details of his chauffeur's rig were a bit unusual, and now that he had been obliged, by some discomfort, to remove his goggles, his face appeared pleasant and quite untanned. His passenger noted these things, remarking: "Oh, it isn't Renaud!"

"No, Mademoiselle; Renaud hadn't showed up at the office when you telephoned, so they put me on in his place."

"Ah, I see." Accent seemed to imply, however, that she was not quite pleased. "The manager sent you. And your name is—?"

"My name—rather odd name—Hand."

The face half hidden behind the veil remained impassive. A moment's hesitation, and then the lady turned away with a short, "You will wait?"

"As mademoiselle wishes. Or shall I perhaps follow slowly along the drive?"

"No, wait here. I shall return—soon."

The young woman walked away, erect, well-poised, lifting skirts skilfully as she paused a moment at the top of the stone steps leading down into the tiny park. The driver of the machine, free from observation, allowed a perplexed look to occupy his countenance. "What the devil is to pay if she doesn't return—soon!"

The avenue lifts a camel's hump toward the sky in the space of fifteen blocks, and on the top, secure as the howdah of a chieftain, stands the noble portico of the old college. To the westward, as every one knows, lie the river and the more pretentious park; on the east an abrupt descent offers space for a small grassy playground for children, who may be seen, during the sunny hours of the day, romping over the slope.

As the gaze of the woman swept over the charming little pleasance, and beyond, over the miles of sign-boards, roofs, chimneys, and intersecting streets, the serious look disappeared from her face. Summer haze and distance shed a gentle beauty over what she knew to be a clamoring city—New York. Angles were softened, noises subdued, sensational scenes lost in the dimmed perspective. To a chance observer, the prospect would have been deeply suggestive; in the woman it stirred many memories. She put back her veil; her face glowed; a long sigh escaped her lips. Slowly she walked down the steps, along the sloping path to a turn, where she sank down on a bench. A rosy, tired child, rather the worse for mud-pies, and hanging reluctantly at the hand of its nonchalant nurse, brought a bit of the woman's emotion to the surface. She smiled radiantly at the lagging infant.

The face revealed by the uplifted veil was of a type to accompany the youthful but womanly figure and the spirited tread. Beautiful she would be counted, without doubt, by many an observer; those who loved her would call her beautiful without stint. But more appealing than her beauty was the fine spirit—a strong, free spirit, loving honesty and courage—which glowed like a flame behind her beauty. Best of all, perhaps, was a touch of quaintness, a slightly comic twist to her lips, an imperceptible alertness of manner, which revealed to the initiated that she had a sense of humor in excellent running order.

It was evident that the little excursion was of the nature of a pilgrimage. The idle hour, the bit of holiday, became a memorial, as recollection brought back to her the days of childhood spent down yonder, a few squares away, in this very city. They seemed bright in retrospect, like the pleasant paths of a quiet garden, but they had ended abruptly, and had been followed by years of activity and colorful experience in another country. Through it all what anticipations had been lodged in her return to Home! Something there would complete the story—the story with its secret ecstasies and aspirations—the story of the ardent springs of youth.

Withdrawing her gaze from the scene below, though with apparent reluctance, she took from the pocket of her coat an opened envelope which she regarded a moment with thoughtfulness, before drawing forth the enclosures. There were two letters, one of which was brief and written in bad script on a single sheet of paper bearing a legal head. It was dated at Charlesport, Maine, and stated that the writer, in conformity with the last wish of his friend and client, Hercules Thayer, was ready to transfer certain deeds and papers to the late Mr. Thayer's designated heir, Agatha Redmond; also that the writer requested an interview at Miss Redmond's earliest convenience.

Holding the half-opened sheets in her hand, the lady closed her eyes and sat motionless, as if in the grasp of an absorbing thought. With the disappearing child, the signs of life on the hillside had diminished. The traffic of the street passed far below, the sharp click-click of a pedestrian now and then sounded above, but no one passed her way. The hum of the city made a blurred wash of sound, like the varying yet steady wash of the sea. As she opened her eyes again, she saw that the twilight had perceptibly deepened. Far away, lights began to flash out in the city, as if a million fireflies, by twos and threes and dozens, were waking to their nocturnal revelry.

On the hill the light was still good, and the lady turned again to her reading. The other letter was written on single sheets of thin paper in an old-fashioned, beautiful hand. Wherever a double-s occurred, the first was written long, in the style of sixty years ago; and the whole letter was as easily legible as print. Across the top was written: "To Agatha Redmond, daughter of my ward and dear friend, Agatha Shaw Redmond"; and below that, in the lawyer's choppy handwriting, was a date of nearly a year previous. As Agatha Redmond read the second letter, a smile, half of sadness, half of pleasure, overspread her countenance. It ran as follows:

"ILION, MAINE.

"MY DEAR AGATHA:

"I take my pen in hand to address you, the daughter of the dearest friend of my life, for the first time in the twenty-odd years of your existence. Once as a child you saw me, and you have doubtless heard my name from your mother's people from time to time; but I can scarcely hope that any knowledge of my private life has come to you. It will be easy, then, for you to pardon an old man for giving you, in this fashion, the confidence he has never been able to bestow in the flesh.

"When you read this epistle, my dear Agatha, I shall have stepped into that next mystery, which is Death. Indeed, the duty which I am now discharging serves as partial preparation for that very event. This duty is to make you heir to my house and estate and to certain accessory funds which will enable you to keep up the place.

"You may regard this act, possibly, as the idiosyncrasy of an unbalanced mind; it is certain that some of my kinsfolk will do so. But while I have been able to bear up under their greater or less displeasure for many years, I find myself shrinking before the possibility of dying absolutely unknown and forgotten by you. Your mother, Agatha Shaw, of blessed memory now for many years, was my ward and pupil after the death of your grandfather. I think I may say without undue self-congratulation that few women of their time have enjoyed as sound a scheme of education as your mother. She had a knowledge of mathematics, could construe both in Latin and Greek, and had acquired a fair mastery of the historic civilization of the Greeks, Egyptians and ancient Babylonians. While these attainments would naturally be insufficient for a man's work in life, yet for a woman they were of an exceptional order.

"Sufficient to say that in your mother's character these noteworthy abilities were supplemented by gracious, womanly arts; and when she arrived at maturity, I offered her the honor of marriage.

"It is painful for me to recall the scene and the consequences of your mother's refusal of my hand, even after these years of philosophical reflection. It were idle for a man of parts to allow a mere preference in regard to his domestic situation to influence his course of action in any essential matter, and I have never permitted my career to be shaped by such details. But from that time, however, the course of my life was changed. From the impassioned orator and preacher I was transformed into the man of books and the study, and since then I have lived far from the larger concourses of men. My weekly sermon, for twenty years, has been the essence of my weekly toil in establishing the authenticity, first, of the entire second gospel, and second, of the ten doubtful verses in the fifteenth chapter. My work is now accomplished—for all time, I believe.

"From the inception of what I considered my life mission, I made the resolve to bequeath to Agatha Shaw whatever manuscripts or other material of value my work should lead me to accumulate, together with this house, in which I have spent all the later years of my life. You are Agatha Shaw's only child, therefore to me a foster-child.

"Another reason, four years ago, led me to confirm my former testament. From time to time I have informed myself concerning your movements and fortunes. The work you have chosen, my dear Agatha, I can but believe to be fraught with unusual dangers to a young woman. Therefore I hope that this home, modest as it is, may tempt you to an early retirement from the stage, and lead you to a more private and womanly career. This I make only as a request, not as a condition. I bid you farewell, and give you my blessing.

"Faithfully yours,

"HERCULES THAYER."

Agatha Redmond folded the thin sheets carefully. There was a mist in her gaze as she looked off toward the distant city lights.

"Dear old gentleman! His whole love-story, and my mother's, too, perhaps!" Her quickened memory recalled childish impressions of a visit to a large country house and of a solemn old man—he seemed incredibly ancient to her—and of feeling that in some way she and her mother were in a special relationship to the house. It was called "the old red house," and was full of fascinating things. The ancient man had bidden her go about and play as if it were her home, and then had called her to him and laid open a book, leading her mind to regard its mysteries. Greek! It seemed to her as if she had begun it there and then. Later the mother became the teacher. She was nursed, as it were, within sight of the windy plains of Troy and to the sound of the Homeric hymns—and all by reason of this ancient scholar.

There was a vivid picture in her mind, gathered at some later visit, of a soft hillside, a small white church standing under its balm-of-gilead tree, and herself sitting by a stone in the old churchyard, listening to the strains of a hymn which floated out from the high, narrow windows. She remembered how, from without, she had joined in the hymn, singing with all her small might; and suddenly the association brought back to her a more recent event and a more beautiful strain of music. Half in reverie, half in conscious pleasure in the exercise of a facile organ, she began to sing:

"Free of my pain, free of my burden of sorrow,
At last I shall see thee—"

The song floated in a zone of silence that lay above the deep-murmuring city. The voice was no more than the half-voice of a flute, sweet, gentle, beguiling. It told, as so many songs tell, of little earthly Love in the grasp of mighty Fate. Still she sang on, softly, as if loving the entrancing melody.

Suddenly the song ceased, and the reminiscent smile gave place to an expression of surprise, as the singer became conscious of a deeper shadow falling directly in front of her. She glanced up quickly, and found herself looking into the face of a man whose gimlet-like gaze was directed upon herself.

Quickly as she rose, she could not turn into the path before the gentleman, hat in hand, with a deep bow and clearly enunciated words, arrested her impulse to flight.

"Pardon, Mademoiselle, I am a stranger in the city. I was directed this way to Van Cortlandt Hall, but I find I am in error, intrigued—in confusion. Would mademoiselle be so good as to direct me?"

The tones had a foreign accent. There was something, also, in their bland impertinence which put Miss Redmond on her guard. He was a good-sized, blond person, carefully dressed, and at least appeared like a gentleman.

Miss Redmond looked into the smooth, neat countenance, upon which no record either of experience or of thought was engraved, and decided fleetingly that he was lying. She judged him capable of picking up acquaintances on the street, but thought that more originality might be expected of him.

Suddenly she wished that she had returned sooner to her car, for though she was of an adventurous nature, her bravery was not of the physical order; and she disliked to have the appearance of unconventionality. After the first minute she was not so much afraid as annoyed. Her voice became frigid, though her dignity was somewhat damaged by the fact that she bungled in giving the desired information.

"I think monsieur will find Van Cortlandt Hall in the College grounds two blocks south—no, north—of the gateway yonder, at the upper end of this walk."

"Ah, mademoiselle is but too kind!" He bowed deeply again, hat still in hand. "I thank you profoundly. And may I say, also, that this wonderful picture—" here he spread eloquent hands toward the half-quiescent city whose thousand eyes glimmered over the lower distance—"this panorama of occidental life, makes a peculiar appeal to the imagination?"

The springs of emotion, touched potently as they had been by the surging recollections of the last half-hour, were faintly stirred again in Miss Redmond's heart by the stranger's grandiloquent words. Unconsciously her features relaxed, though she did not reply.

"Again I pray mademoiselle to pardon me, but only a moment past I heard the song—the song that might be the sigh of all the daughters of Italy. Ah, Mademoiselle, it is wonderful! But here in this so fresh country, this youthful, boisterous, too prosperous country, that song is like—like—like Arabian spices in a kitchen. Is it not so?"

Miss Redmond was moving up the steps toward the entrance, hesitating between the desire to snub her interlocutor and to avoid the appearance of fright. The man, meanwhile, moved easily beside her, courteously distant, discourteously insistent in his prattle. But the motor-car was now not far away.

The stranger looked appealingly at her, seemingly sure of a humorous answering look to his pleasantry. It was not wholly denied. She yielded to a touch of amusement with a cool smile, and hastened her steps. The man kept pace without effort. Luckily, the car stood only a few feet away, with Renaud, or rather Hand, at the curb, holding open the door. A vague bow and a lifting of the hat, and apparently the stranger went the other way. She felt a foolish relief, and at the same instant noted with surprise that the cover of her car had been raised.

"Why did you raise the top?"

"It appeared to me, Mademoiselle, that it was likely to rain."

"Put it down again. It will not rain," Miss Redmond was saying, when, from sidelong eyes, she saw that the stranger had not turned in the other direction, after all, but was almost in her tracks, as though he were stalking game. With foot on the step she said sharply, but in a low voice, "To the Plaza quickly," then immediately added, with a characteristic practical turn: "But don't get yourself arrested for speeding."

"No, Mademoiselle, with this car I can make—" Even as the chauffeur replied, Miss Redmond's sharpened senses detected a passage of glances between him and the stranger, now close behind her.

She sprang into the tonneau and seized the door, but not before the man had caught at it with a stronger hold, and stepped in close after her. The chauffeur was in his seat, the car was moving slowly, now faster and faster. Suddenly the bland countenance slid very near her own, while firm hands against her shoulders crowded her into the farther corner of the tonneau.

"O Renaud—Hand!" she cried, but the driver made no sign. "Help, help!" she shrieked, but the cry was instantly choked into a feeble protest. A mass of something, pressed to her mouth and nostrils, incited her to superhuman efforts. She struggled frantically, fumbled at the door, tore at the curtain, and succeeded in getting her head for an instant at the opening, while she clutched her assailant and held him helpless. But only for a moment. The firm large hands quickly overpowered even the strength induced by frenzy, and in another minute she was lying unresisting on the soft cushions of the tonneau.

The car careened through the streets, the figure of the unresponsive Hand mocked her cries for help, the neat hard face of the stranger continued to bend over her. Then everything swam in a maelstrom of duller and duller sense, the world grew darker and fainter, till finally it was lost in silence.

CHAPTER II

HAMBLETON OF LYNN

The Hambletons of Lynn had not distinguished themselves, in late generations at least, by remarkable deeds, though their deportment was such as to imply that they could if they would. They frankly regarded themselves as the elect of earth, if not of Heaven, always, however, with a becoming modesty. Since 1636 the family had pieced out its existence in the New World, tenaciously clinging to many of its old-country habits. It had kept the b in the family name, for instance; it had kept the name itself out of trade, and it had indulged its love of country life at the expense of more than one Hambleton fortune.

A daughter-in-law was once reported as saying that it would have been a good thing if some Hambleton had embarked in trade, since in that case they might have been saved from devoting themselves exclusively to an illustration of polite poverty. She was never forgiven, and died without being reconciled to the family. As to the spelling of the name, the family claimed ancestral authority as far back as King Fergus the First. Mrs. Van Camp, a relative by marriage—a woman considered by the best Hambletons as far too frank and worldly-minded—informed the family that King Fergus was as much a myth as Dido, and innocently brought forth printed facts to corroborate her statement. One of the ladies Hambleton crushed Mrs. Van Camp by stating, in a tone of deep personal conviction, with her cap awry, "So much the worse for Dido!"

A salient strength persisted in the Hambletons—a strength which retained its character in spite of cross-currents. The Hambleton tone and the Hambleton ideas retained their family color, and became, whether worthily or not, a part of the Hambleton pride. More than one son had lost his health or entire fortune, which was apt not to be large, in attempts to carry on a country place. "A Hambleton trait!" they chuckled, with as much satisfaction as they considered it good form to exhibit. In Lynn, where family pride did not bring in large returns, this phrase became almost synonymous with genteel foolishness.

The Van Camp fortune, which came near but never actually into the family, was generally understood to have been made in shoes, though in reality it was drugs.

"People say 'shoes' the minute they hear the word Lynn, and I'm tired of explaining," Mrs. Van Camp put it. She was third in line from the successful druggist, and could afford, if anybody could, to be supercilious toward trade. But she wasn't, even after twenty years of somewhat restless submission to the Hambleton yoke. And it was she who, during her last visit to the family stronghold, held up before the young James the advantages of a commercial career.

"You're a nice boy, Jimsy, and I can't see you turned into a poor lawyer. You're not hard-headed enough to be a good one. As for being a minister, well—no. Go into business, dear boy, something substantial, and you'll live to thank your stars."

Jimsy received this advice at the time with small enthusiasm, and a reservation of criticism that was a credit to his manners, at least. But the time came when he leaned on it.

Her own child, however, Mrs. Van Camp encouraged to a profession from the first. "Aleck isn't smart enough for business, but he may do something as a student," was Mrs. Van Camp's somewhat trying explanation; and Aleck did do something as a student. Extremely impatient with any exhibition of laziness, the mother demanded a good accounting of her son's time. Aleck and Jim, who were born in the same year, ran more or less side by side until the end of college. They struggled together in sports and in arguments, "rushed" the same girl in turn or simultaneously, and spent their long vacations cruising up and down the Maine coast in a thirty-foot sail-boat. Once they made a more ambitious journey all the way to Yarmouth and the Bay of Fundy in a good-sized fishing-smack.

But when college was done, their ways separated. Mrs. Van Camp, in the prime of her unusual faculties, died, having decorated the Hambleton 'scutcheon like a gay cockade stuck airily up into the breeze. She had no part nor lot in the family pride, but understood it, perhaps, better than the Hambletons themselves. Her crime was that she played with it. Aleck, a full-fledged biologist, went to the Little Hebrides to work out his fresh and salad theory concerning the nerve system of the clam.

James, third son of John and Edith Hambleton of Lynn, had his eyes thoroughly opened in the three months after Commencement by a consideration of the family situation. It seemed to him that from babyhood he had been burningly conscious of the pinching and skimping necessary to maintain the family pride. The two older brothers were exempt from the scorching process, the eldest being the family darling and the second a genius. Neither one could rationally be expected, "just at present," to take up the family accounts and make the income square up with even a decently generous outgo. And there were the girls yet to be educated. Jim had no special talent to bless himself with, either in art or science. He was inordinately fond of the sea, but that did not help him in choosing a career. He had good taste in books and some little skill in music. He was, indeed, thrall to the human voice, especially to the low voice in woman, and he was that best of all critics, a good listener. His greatest riches, as well as his greatest charm, lay in a spirit of invincible youth; but he was no genius, no one perceived that more clearly than himself.

So he remembered Clara Van Camp's advice, wrote the whole story to Aleck, and cast about for the one successful business chance in the four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine bad ones—as the statistics have it.

He actually found it in shoes. Foot-ball muscle and grit went into the job of putting a superior shoe on an inferior foot, if necessary—at least on some foot. He got a chance to try his powers in the home branch of a manufacturing house, and made good. When he came to fill a position where there was opportunity to try new ideas, he tried them. He inspected tanneries and stockyards, he got composite measurements of all the feet in all the women's colleges in the year ninety-seven, he drilled salesmen and opened a night school for the buttonhole-makers, he made a scientific study of heels, and he invented an aristocratic arch and put it on the market.

The family joked about his doings as the harmless experiments of a lively boy, but presently they began to enjoy his income. Through it all they were affectionate and kind, with the matter-of-course fondness which a family gives to the member that takes the part of useful drudge. John, the pet of the parents, married, and had his own eyes opened, it is to be supposed. Donald, the genius, had just arrived, after a dozen years or so, at the stage where he was mentioned now and then in the literary journals. But Jim stuck to shoes and kept the family on a fair tide of modest prosperity.

Once, in the years of Jim's apprenticeship to life, there came over him a fit of soul-sickness that nearly proved his ruin.

"I can't stand this," he wrote Aleck Van Camp; "It's too hard and dry and sordid for any man that's got a soul. It isn't the grind I mind, though that is bad enough; it is the 'Commercial Idea' that eats into a man's innards. He forgets there are things that money can't buy, and in his heart he grows contemptuous of anything to be had 'without money and without price.' He can't help it. If he is thinking of trade nine-tenths of the time, his mind gets set that way. I'm ready any minute to jump the fence, like father's old colt up on the farm. I'm not a snob, but I recognize now that there was some reason for all our old Hambleton ancestors being so finicky about trade.

"Do you remember how we used to talk, when we were kiddies, about keeping our ideals? Well, I believe I'm bankrupt, Aleck, in my account with ideals. I don't want to howl, and these remarks don't go with anybody else, but I can say, to you, I want them back again."

Aleck did as a kiddie should do, writing much advice on long sheets of paper, and illustrating his points richly, like a good Scotchman, with scientific instances. A month or two later he contrived to have work to do in Boston, so that he could go out to Lynn and look up Jimmy's case. He even devised a cure by creating, in his mind, an office in the biological world which was to be offered to James on the ground that science needed just his abilities and training. But when Aleck arrived in Lynn he found that Jim, in some fashion or other, had found a cure for himself. He was deeper than ever in the business, and yet, in some spiritual sense, he had found himself. He had captured his ideal again and yoked it to duty—which is a great feat.

After twelve years of ferocious labor, with no vacations to speak of, James's mind took a turn for the worse. Physically he was as sound as a bell, though of a lath-like thinness; but an effervescing in his blood lured his mind away from the study of lasts and accounts and Parisian models and sent it careering, like Satan, up and down the earth. Romance, which had been drugged during the transition from youth to manhood, awoke and coaxed for its rights, and whispered temptingly in an ear not yet dulled to its voice. Freedom, open spaces, laughter, the fresh sweep of the wind, the high bucaneering piracy of life and joy—these things beglamoured his senses.

So one day he locked his desk with a final click. The business was in good shape. It is but justice to say that if it had not been, Romance had dangled her luring wisp o' light in vain. Several of his new schemes had worked out well, his subordinates were of one mind with him, trade was flourishing. He felt he could afford a little spin.

Jimsy's radiating fancies focussed themselves, at last, on the vision of a trig little sail-boat, "a jug of wine, a loaf of bread" in the cabin, with possibly the book of verses underneath the bow, or more suitably, in the shadow of the sail; and Aleck Van Camp and himself astir in the rigging or plunging together from the gunwale for an early swim. "And before I get off, I'll hear a singer that can sing," he declared.

He telegraphed Aleck, who was by this time running down the eyelid of the squid, to meet him at his club in New York. Then he made short work with the family. Experience had taught him that an attack from ambush was most successful.

"Look here, Edith,"—this was at the breakfast-table the very morning of his departure. Edith was sixteen, the tallest girl in the academy, almost ready for college and reckoned quite a queen in her world—"You be good and do my chores for me while I'm away, and I'll bring you home a duke. Take care of mother's bronchitis, and keep the house straight. I'm going on a cruise."

"All right, Jim"—Edith could always be counted on to catch the ball—"go ahead and have a bully time and don't drown yourself. I'll drive the team straight to water, mother and dad and the whole outfit, trust me!"

Considering the occasion and the correctness of the sentiments, Jim forbore, for once, from making the daily suggestion that she chasten her language. By the time the family appeared, Jim had laid out a rigid course of action for Miss Edith, who rose to the occasion like a soldier.

"Mother'll miss you, of course, but Jack and Harold"—two of Edith's admirers—"Jack and Harold can come around every day—stout arm to lean upon, that sort of thing. You know mother can't be a bit jolly without plenty of men about, and since Sue became engaged she really doesn't count. The boys will think they are running things, of course, but they'll see my iron hand in the velvet glove—you can throw a blue chip on that, Jimsy. And don't kiss me, Jim, for Dorothy Snell and I vowed, when we wished each other's rings on—Oh, well, brothers don't count."

And so, amid the farewells of a tender, protesting family, he got off, leaving Edith in the midst of one of her monologues.

There was a telegram in New York saying that Aleck Van Camp would join him in three days, at the latest. Hambleton disliked the club and left it, although his first intention had been to put up there. He picked out a modest, up-town hotel, new to him, for no other reason than that it had a pretty name, The Larue. Then he began to consider details.

The day after his arrival was occupied in making arrangements for his boat. He put into this matter the same painstaking buoyancy that he had put into a dull business for twelve years. He changed his plans half a dozen times, and exceeded them wholly in the size and equipment of the little vessel, and in the consequent expense; but he justified himself, as men will, by a dozen good reasons. The trig little sail-boat turned out to be a respectable yacht, steam, at that. She was called the Sea Gull. Neat in the beam, stanch in the bows, rigged for coasting and provided with a decent living outfit, she was "good enough for any gentleman," in the opinion of the agent who rented her. Jim was half ashamed at giving up the more robust scheme of sailing his own boat, with Aleck; but some vague and expansive spirit moved him "to see," as he said, "what it would be like to go as far and as fast as we please." While they were about it, they would call on some cousins at Bar Harbor and get good fun out of it.

The idea of his holiday grew as he played with it. As his spin took on a more complicated character, his zest rose. He went forth on Sunday feeling as if some vital change was impending. His little cruise loomed up large, important, epochal. He laughed at himself and thought, with his customary optimism, that a vacation was worth waiting twelve years for, if waiting endowed it with such a flavor. Jim knew that Aleck would relish the spin, too. Aleck's nature was that of a grind tempered with sportiness. Jim sat down Sunday morning and wrote out the whole program for Aleck's endorsement, sent the letter by special delivery and went out to reconnoiter.

The era of Sunday orchestral concerts had begun, but that day, to Jim's regret, the singer was not a contralto. "Dramatic Soprano" was on the program; a new name, quite unknown to Jim. His interest in the soloist waned, but the orchestra was enough. He thanked Heaven that he was past the primitive stage of thinking any single voice more interesting than the assemblage of instruments known as orchestra.

Hambleton found a place in the dim vastness of the hall, and sank into his seat in a mood of vivid anticipation. The instruments twanged, the audience gathered, and at last the music began. Its first effect was to rouse Hambleton to a sharp attention to details—the director, the people in the orchestra, the people in the boxes; and then he settled down, thinking his thoughts. The past, the future, life and its meaning, love and its power, the long, long thoughts of youth and ambition and desire came flocking to his brain. The noble confluence of sound that is music worked upon him its immemorial miracle; his heart softened, his imagination glowed, his spirit stirred. Time was lost to him—and earth.

The orchestra ceased, but Hambleton did not heed the commotion about him. The pause and the fresh beginning of the strings scarcely disturbed his ecstatic reverie. A deep hush lay upon the vast assemblage, broken only by the voices of the violins. And then, in the zone of silence that lay over the listening people—silence that vibrated to the memory of the strings—there rose a little song. To Hambleton, sitting absorbed, it was as if the circuit which galvanized him into life had suddenly been completed. He sat up. The singer's lips were slightly parted, and her voice at first was no more than the half-voice of a flute, sweet, gentle, beguiling. It was borne upward on the crest of the melody, fuller and fuller, as on a flooding tide.