Then, remorsefully, she went down-stairs, and after supper she played all the evening on the piano; but the airs that she chose were in a simple strain—minstrel songs of a generation ago, like “Nelly was a lady” and “Hard times come again no more,” from a battered old book of her mother’s. “Wouldn’t you like to try a few Moody and Sankeys?” Henriette jeered after a while. “Foster seems to me only one degree less maudlin and commonplace. He makes me think of tuberoses!” Pauline laughed and went to the window. The white porcupine of electric light at the corner threw out long spikes of radiance athwart the narrow sidewalk, and a man’s shadow dipped into the lighted space. The man was leaning his arms on the fence. “Foolish fellow!” Pauline laughed softly to herself. That night, shortly after she had dropped asleep, she was awakened out of a dream of staying to supper with the Armstrongs, and beholding the board loaded with broiled chickens and plum-pudding, by a clutch on her shoulder. “It was _quite_ accidental,” she pleaded; “it really was, sister Etty!” For her dream seemed to project itself into real life, and there was Henriette, a stern figure in flowing white, bending over her. “Wake up!” she cried. “Listen! There’s something awful happening at the Armstrongs’.” Pauline sat up in bed as suddenly as a jack-in-the-box. Then she gave a little gasp of laughter. “They are all right,” said she; “they are playing on their organ. That’s the way they play.” The organ ceased to moan, and Henriette returned to her couch. In ten minutes she was back again, shaking Pauline. “Wake up!” she cried. “How can you sleep in such a racket? He has been murdering popular tunes by inches, and now what he is doing I don’t know, but it is _awful_. You know them best. Get up and call to them that we can’t sleep for the noise they make.” “I suppose they have a right to play on their own organ.” “They haven’t a right to make such a pandemonium anywhere. If you won’t do something, I’m going to pretend I think it’s cats, and call ‘Scat!’ and throw something at them.” “You wouldn’t hit anything,” Pauline returned, in that sleepy tone which always rouses a wakeful sufferer’s wrath. “Better shut your window. You can’t hear nearly so well then.” “Yes, sister, I’ll shut the window,” Mysie called from the chamber, as usual eager for peace. “You let that window alone,” commanded Henriette, sternly. A long pause—Henriette seated in rigid agony at the foot of the bed; the Armstrongs experimenting with the Vox Humana stop. “Pauline, do you mean to say that you can sleep? Pauline! _Pauline!_” “What’s the matter now?” asked Pauline. “I am going to take my brush—no, I shall take _your_ brush, Pauline Beaumont—and hurl it at them!” “Oh, sister, please don’t,” begged Mysie from within, like the voices on a stage.