One day, when she came in, she heard the sound of the piano. The knocking of loose hammers on dead wires, the light, hacking clang of chords rolling like dead drum taps: Droom--Droom, Droom-era-room. Alone in the dusk, Mamma was playing the Hungarian March, bowing and swaying as she played. When the door opened she started up, turning her back on the piano, frightened, like a child caught in a play it is ashamed of. The piano looked mournful and self-conscious. Then suddenly, all by itself, it shot out a cry like an arrow, a pinging, stinging, violently vibrating cry. "I'm afraid," Mamma said, "something's happened to the piano." IV. They were turning out the cabinet drawer, when they found the bundle of letters. Mamma had marked it in her sharp, three cornered hand-writing: "Correspondence, Mary." "Dear me," she said, "I didn't know I'd kept those letters." She slipped them from the rubber band and looked at them. You could see Uncle Victor's on the top, then Maurice Jourdain's. You heard the click of her tongue that dismissed those useless, unimportant things. The slim, yellowish letter at the bottom was Miss Lambert's. "Tt-tt--" "Oh, let me see that." She looked over her mother's shoulder. They read together. "We don't want her to go.... She made us love her more in one fortnight than girls we've had with us for years.... Perhaps some day we may have her again." The poor, kind woman. The kind, dead woman. Years ago dead; her poor voice rising up, a ghostlike wail over your "unbelief." That was only the way she began. "I say--I say!" The thin voice was quivering with praise. Incredible, bewildering praise. "Remarkable.--remarkable".--You would have thought there had never been such a remarkable child as Mary Olivier. It came back to her. She could see Miss Lambert talking to her father on the platform at Victoria. She could see herself, excited, running up the flagged walk at Five Elms. And Mamma coming down the hall. And what happened then. The shock and all the misery that came after. "That was the letter you wouldn't let me read." "What do you mean?" "The day I came back. I asked you to let me read it and you wouldn't." "Really, Mary, you accuse me of the most awful things. I don't believe I wouldn't let you read it." "You didn't. I remember. You didn't want me to know--" "Well," her mother said, giving in suddenly, "if I didn't, it was because I thought it would make you even more conceited than you were. I don't suppose I was very well pleased with you at the time." "Still--you kept it." But her mother was not even going to admit that she had kept it. She said, "I must have overlooked it. But we can burn it now." She carried it across the room to the fire. She didn't want even now--even now. You saw again the old way of it, her little obstinate, triumphant smile, the look that paid you out, that said, "See how I've sold you."