The stormy, insistent strains of the “Appassionata” filled the room, surging through every fiber of her, lifting and abasing her by turns. How could she get hold of herself while Gerald played like that? She was sinking in a great sea of emotion and the music swept about her like a mighty gale, shutting out everything in the world but Donald Morley. He had not failed her, it was she who had failed him. He was coming home, and it was too late. She would have to meet him face to face, to see all that he had suffered in his eyes and speak no word. Surely she might give him this one hour, just while the music lasted; give it to him and to herself for the lifetime together they had missed. She did not know when the music stopped, she did not know when Gerald came back to the hassock at her feet. He had evidently been there some time when she was aware of his elbow on the arm of her chair, and his head buried in it. “Gerald!” she said, starting up; “what's the matter?” “Everything. Is that your trouble?” “What do you mean?” “I mean that you are unhappy,” he said, catching her hand. She sprang to her feet and snapped on the electric lights. “Do I look as if I were unhappy?” she demanded, flashing on him her old, bright smile. “It was the music, and the twilight, and the way you played. That sonata ought never to be played except in a crowded room with all the lights on.” “It wasn't the music,” Gerald persisted; “you know it wasn't. Something's troubling you, and something is troubling me. May I tell you what is the matter with me, Miss Lady?” He was looking at her very intently across the table, and Miss Lady for the first time recognized the danger signals in his eyes. “Let me guess!” she cried, her wits springing to her rescue. “I think I know. I thought so when I first came in. It's mumps!” Gerald's hand flew instinctively to his face, and his eyes sought the mirror. Miss Lady, in applying to Gerald Ivy, Uncle Jimpson's remedy for a balking mule, had averted a disaster. CHAPTER XV Time was an abstraction of which the inhabitants of Bean Alley took little notice. The arbitrary division of one's life into weeks and days and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day. As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every corner of the world. On this particular fall afternoon, just outside Phineas Flathers' cottage, a lively game was in progress. It was a game known in Bean Alley as “Sockabout,” and it had to do with caps or battered hats laid in a row, and with a small rubber ball that was thrown into them from a distance. Like many other apparently simple diversions, Sockabout had its complexities. In fact, the rules admitted of so many interpretations that an umpire was indispensable.