"Pshaw!" she said, as naturally as if really vexed. "That piece is very difficult. I thought that I had mastered it, a dozen times, yet here it is bothering me again. Never mind!--I know what I _can_ play--something that you like, or if you do not, you should!" And very much to Crawford's delight, for she did not often sing, though she frequently _hummed_,--she broke out with voice and instrument into that finest, though worst-hackneyed, of modern love-ballads--"Ever of Thee." There are unaccountable fancies, in music as well as in personal regard, and one piece will sometimes make itself the very key-note of a human heart, without being in itself so pre-eminently beautiful as to command that distinction. Crawford had before many times heard Josephine Harris humming that air, or touching it lightly on the keys of the piano, but he had never before heard her _sing_ it. Before half of the first stanza was finished, he knew that it supplied to her a need in music that all the compositions of all the great masters would fail to fill; and before she had finished the last, he believed that some painful secret of her young life must be bound up in it. He was the more painfully confirmed in that belief, when he saw her rise from the piano the moment after she had concluded the song, and dash her hand to her eyes with the unmistakeable gesture of wiping away a tear. "Joe--dear Joe," he said, "come here a moment." She crossed the room at once and stood beside him. He held out his hand to her, and she took it as a sister might have taken that of a dearly beloved brother. There was nothing of heat or tremor in the touch, though there was everything of kindness. Absorbed in something else, both had for the moment forgotten the feeling before predominant--Crawford his sickness and crippled condition, and Joe Harris her anxieties and her plans with reference to him. "Josephine Harris," he said, very kindly, almost tenderly, "answer me one question, as candidly as it is asked. Will you?" "You could not ask me an improper question," she replied, "and so I could have no reason for refusing to answer you. I will." "You have been singing 'Ever of Thee,'" he went on. "Your whole heart was in it when you sung, and when you stopped your voice was broken and your eyes were full of tears. Tell me--is there a sad secret of your life connected with that song? Consider me your brother, and do not be afraid or ashamed to answer me." "Richard Crawford, I _do_ consider you as a brother," the young girl replied--"a _dear_ brother, in whom I would confide as in one of my own blood. I mean to prove to you, some day, what a true sister I am. I am neither afraid or ashamed to answer your question. I have no grief or sad memory connected with 'Ever of Thee,' any more than with any other sadly beautiful piece of music with words of the same character."