And before he could protest her fingers were touching the piano with the ease of the born musician. He sat enraptured as he watched the sinuous grace with which her fingers touched the ivory keys and heard their answering cry which seemed the breath of her own soul in echo. She had an easy apparently careless touch. To old familiar music she gave a charm that was new, adding something indefinable to the musician’s thought that gave luminous power to its interpretation. He had no knowledge of the technique of music, but now he knew that she was improvising. The piano was the voice of her own beautiful soul, and it was pulsing with a tenderness that melted him to tears. Suddenly the music ceased, and she turned her face full on his before he could brush away a big tear that rolled down. She flushed, closed the piano, and quietly resumed her place by his side. “And, now, you haven’t told me how well I played. You’re the first young man so careless.” “I have told you.” “How?” “The way you told me yesterday that you understood me--with a tear.” “I appreciate it more than words.” “So did I,” he slowly said. Again there was a long silence. “But we do love to hear folks say in words what they think sometimes. I confess I was immensely elated over the fine things the paper said about me this morning.” “It’s a wonder too. Our editor is a cranky sort of fellow. I was afraid he’d say a lot of mean things about you. But Papa says you swallowed him whole.” “Did you wish him to say kind things about me?” “Of course,” she said, and then the look of mischief came back in her eye. “Were you not our guest? I should have felt like whipping him if he hadn’t said nice things.” “Then I ’ll tell you what I think about your playing. You gave those strings a soul for the first time for me, beautiful, living, throbbing, that spoke a message of its own. The piece you improvised, I shall never forget. Such music seems to me the grasping of the infinite by hands that touch the impalpable and bringing it for a moment within the sphere of matter that a kindred soul may hear and see and feel.” She started to make some reply but her lips quivered and she looked away across the valley at the river and made no answer. At dinner the General was in his most genial mood, laughing and joking, and drawing out Gaston on politics and cotton-mill developments, and trying with all his might to tease his daughter. As he took his departure for the mills, he said, “Young man, I’d ask you to go with me and look at the machinery, but I see it’s no use. I heard her twisting you around her fingers with that piano a while ago.” “Papa, don’t be so silly!’ cried Sallie, slipping her arm around him, putting one hand over his mouth, and kissing him. “Go on to your work. I ’ll entertain Mr. Gaston.” “Indeed you will!” he shouted, throwing her another kiss as he left. “He’s the dearest father any girl ever had in this world. I know you loved yours, didn’t you, Mr. Gaston?”