“Won’t you let me go along, please? You see--you see, I’m dining there!” “Not really!” He laughed aloud. He had lied and she was not fair game for falsehood. “Well, I carry a key to my sister’s front door and I can always have a place there.” They dropped the discussion for the moment; it was quite a mile to the Blair’s and the moment was sufficient unto itself. He forgot that there could be any question of her accepting his escort. His heartbeats quickened as he found her walking beside him with a free step that fell in comfortably with his own swinging stride. She walked as people walk who are bred in a hill country--with a slight sway of the body from the hips--and she carried her head high. In imagination he robed her in fashionable raiment, a figure of distinction in any company, only to protest to himself that her qualities were superior to feathers or flounces and were as new in her as though no woman had ever possessed them before. The music still sang in her heart; she had been greatly moved by it. Before Sargent’s portrait he had felt only her tyro’s ineptness; but music had stolen her away from herself, and carried her close to golden lands of promise. “How does the work go at the Institute?” “Oh, I keep at it. I have good days and bad. Sometimes my eyes don’t see straight and my fingers are sticks. This afternoon the music made it all seem easy; I think it would help if the orchestra played in our class room.” “A capital idea; I’ll speak to the directors about it. Music does seem to pry us loose from the earth. You may be surprised to know that I used to dabble at the violin myself--a long time ago. I was looked on as a promising student, and might have been a real good fiddler if I had kept it up.” “But you still play, of course?” “Not by a long shot! I broke my fiddle on my seventeenth birthday and turned toward a business career.” “I suppose you had to do that.” “Well, it didn’t seem quite square to my ancestors to fit myself to be the third fiddler in an orchestra; they were eminently practical persons. If I had kept at music as a life business very likely their shades would have haunted me and snapped my fiddle strings. But I have no regrets. I should probably have starved to death if my early ambitions hadn’t been thwarted. Anyhow, I guess I’m a kind of fatalist; if it had been in the books that I was to go fiddling through the world--why, I should have fiddled. And in the same way, it was ordained that you should go in for art, and here you are, spending your days at it and nothing could head you off.” “Oh, yes; many things could! Many things tried!”