Young Paul Gaspard was eager to be gone for a run up the mountain at the back of the bungalow. Had he known how very nearly the eager light in his grey eyes and the eager emotion quivering in his angel-like face—for so his foolish mother saw it—was to breaking down the resolution that was hardening his mother’s voice, he would have turned the full batteries of eyes and face upon her and won. “No, dear, duty first; pleasure afterwards. Remember Nelson, you know.” “Yes, I know, but Nelson was on a jolly big ship and going into a big fight, Mother. I hate practising—at least,” catching the look of surprise and pain which his mother just managed to substitute in time for that of tender pride—“at least, sometimes—and ’specially this morning. It’s a perfeckly ’dorable morning.” “The harder the duty, the better the discipline, you know. That’s what makes good soldiers, my boy. Come along, get it over. Quick! March! Besides, you know you would just love to get that little _rondo_ right—tum te-ta-te-tum di. Let me hear you,” said his mother guilefully. “No, that’s wrong, Mother. It’s tum-te-ta te tum-di.” He ran to the piano and played the phrase. “Well, what did I say? Oh, yes, I see, the phrasing was wrong. How does it go?” In a minute the boy was absorbed in his _rondo_. His mother sat in the sunlit window listening to the practising. Her face was worn and lined with pain. But as she listened, watching the long clever fingers flitting so surely and smoothly over the keys, the lines of pain and weariness seemed to be filled in with warm waves of light. She lay back in her easy chair, knowing herself to be unobserved, and gave herself over to a luxurious hour of loving pride in her son. He had a true feeling for what was fine and sound in music and a gift of interpretation extraordinary for one of his age. It was his heritage from his father who in his youth had discovered to his instructors a musical ability amounting almost to genius. Had he possessed that element in genius which is a capacity for taking pains he undoubtedly would have made a great artist on the piano. “If your father had been made to practise he would have been a great player,” his mother would say to Paul, on occasions when, thrilled to the heart, they sat drinking the weird and mystic beauty of the “Moonlight” flowing from his fingers. “Yes, boy,” the father would reply, “if I only had had a stern and relentless taskmistress for a mother, such as you have, eh?” And then the boy and his mother would look at each other and smile. Now the mother was listening and watching while her son did one of Mozart’s Sonatinas with fine touch and expression. “You do that quite well, dear,” she said when the Sonatina was over. “That will do now. You will run to the top of the hill, to the big pine root and then we shall do our lessons——” “Let me do this Minuet first, Mother. I just feel like it now.”