At lamplight in the drawing-room, after coffee, Teddie would raise the dark reflective lid of the grand. "Now, Mother, come and break the Beckstein," he said; almost a formula, that sentence, to John. And Mrs. Marsh would rise and seat herself at the keyboard, carefully adjusting the height of the seat, moving back the music-rack slide, playing a preparatory major scale, that descended in the minor, before proceeding to the real business. Then, a momentary silence, the death of talk, and the first notes trembling into harmony. Never would John forget that first night on which, squatting on the floor at his father's feet, he heard Mrs. Marsh play Schumann's _Papillons_, It opened a new world to him; he seemed to be looking down a long grove of trees into a glade filled with moonlight, where an intruding wind, lost and hesitating, ran from bough to bough awakening whispers. That hesitating prelude, the slow, then quickening announcement of the theme, and the glad, butterfly-flutter of the melody, dying away again into melancholy and silence. Somehow, as John sat there, with his father so near, it brought back other nights, nights on that verandah overlooking the silver Yeshil Irmak, as it flowed singing along the dark gorge, with the high moon peering over the cliffs of Amasia; and a great longing filled him to be back there again just once, to sit in that hot, spiced dusk, to hear the tinkle of the camel bells from the highway, and perhaps the soft voice of Ali, dear old Ali, dignified and melancholy, sitting cross-legged, and reading every mysterious sound of that Eastern night. "There, that's enough for me," cried Mrs. Marsh, breaking across John's reverie. "Come along, John, you've got to sing." "John, sing?" cried Mr. Dean. "I never knew he could sing." "I can't, Dad, it's Mrs. Marsh's idea!" "But he can! Come along, John," and she struck the opening chords of "Drink to me only." "Why, Mr. Dean, your lazy son used to sit here, watching me work night after night, and it was only by accident I found he had a voice--I heard him singing in the bathroom one morning." "Mother's heard me in the bathroom," said Teddie, "but that's why she doesn't ask me." "No shirking, John," called Mrs. Marsh, replaying the opening bars, and obediently John stood up and sang in a light baritone voice. When he had finished there was applause. There was feeling in John's voice; the spirit breaking through the flesh. "You should hear him sing, 'Who is Sylvia?' Mr. Fletcher makes him sing it," said Teddie. "But Mrs. Marsh has no music," answered John finding a loophole for escape. "You fraud--you know you can play it." Mrs. Marsh jumped up. "I believe he can do lots of things--and he sits selfishly here listening to us all blundering." John sat down, placed his hands on the keyboard, and began softly, being very nervous, chiefly because his father was listening.