Tea was brought in by a maid grown gray in his aunt's service, and Miss Lucretia presided. Mark's eyes again wandered from Miss Allison Clyde to Stella with involuntary comparison. No one would have accused Stella of not being a well-bred young woman, yet she sat, Mark noted, carelessly and not quite gracefully. Miss Allison Clyde was taller than Stella, yet she was adjusted to her chair with a disciplined grace and dignity far removed from stiffness. "Stella has promised to sing 'Crabbéd Age' for me again," she announced when tea was finished. "Shall I sing it now?" Stella rose with her promptness, and, going to the piano, plunged at once into the opening bars. Although the composer was not an egoist, he shuddered. "I am making frightful hash of it, I know," Stella confessed, unabashed, as her fingers stumbled. "I think Miss Allison had better play it." Mark glanced quickly at the older woman. "Then it was _you_ I heard a moment ago." "I tried it," she admitted, with a smile. "The title had a melancholy attraction for me. I had no idea the composer was overhearing, or I should have had stage-fright dreadfully." "Play something else," Mark suggested. "It would give me so much pleasure. Something _not_ Mark Faraday." Miss Allison rose decisively. "No, I will play 'Crabbed Age,'" she decided, "and youth shall sing it." And then they ran through it together, the older woman playing it with a musician's sense of its qualities, and Stella singing it through passably in her firm young voice. In answer to Mark's sincere, "Play more," as she started to rise from the piano stool, Miss Allison let her fingers wander through passages of "Meistersinger" in a way that showed a musician's knowledge of the score. "How wonderful that you can play like that still!" exclaimed Stella. The gaucherie of that "still" struck upon Mark's artistic sensibilities, trained in Italian habits of speech. "What a resource it must be!" "For crabbed age," Miss Allison finished. Her smile held a faint amusement. Stella, momentarily silenced, if not abashed, by this explicit voicing of her thought, did not contradict, and Miss Allison continued, "The technic of a Paderewski would be small compensation for lost youth, I fear." She said it without sentimentality, but, as she spoke, lightly touched the delicate theme of the "Golden Apples" that brought eternal youth to the gods, passing into the sublimity of the Valhalla motive. Looking up, she met Mark's comprehension and smiled, then, bringing her chord to a resolution, rose from the piano stool. Mark watched her as she paused to turn over the pages of his "Sun-dial," noting the titles--Sunrise, Morning, High Noon, Afternoon, Evening, Night. "'Youth and Crabbed Age' is Evening, I see," she commented. "Then what is this?" She held up a separate sheet loosely set in the book, reading the title, "Too Late for Love and Loving."