While Menie Laurie still sits by the window, intent and silent, hearing nothing of song or music, but only aware of a hum of inarticulate voices, which her heart longs and strains to understand, but cannot hear. CHAPTER XXII. The music is over, the lesson concluded, and July sits timidly before the piano, striking faint notes with one finger, and marvelling greatly how it is possible to extract anything like an intelligible strain from this waste of unknown chords. Miss Annie is about in the room once more, giving dainty touches to its somewhat defective arrangement--throwing down a book here, and there altering an ornament. Patience, Menie Laurie! many another one before you has sat in resolute outward calm, with a heart all a-throb and trembling, even as yours is. Patience; though it is hard to bear the rustling of Miss Annie’s dress--the faint discords of July’s music. It must have been one time or another, this most momentous interview--all will be over when it is over. Patience, we must wait. But it is a strange piece of provocation on Miss Annie’s part that she should choose this time, and no other, for looking over that little heap of Menie’s drawings upon the table. Menie is not ambitious as an artist--few ideas or romances are in these little works of hers; they are only some faces--not very well executed--the faces of those two or three people whom Menie calls her own. “Come and show them to me, my love.” Menie must not disobey, though her first impulse is to spring out of the low opened window, and rush away somewhere out of reach of all interruption till this long suspense is done. But Menie does not rush away; she only rises slowly--comes to Miss Annie’s side--feels the pressure of Miss Annie’s embracing arm round her--and turns over the drawings; strangely aware of every line in them, yet all the while in a maze of abstraction, listening for their return. Here is Menie’s mother--and here again another, and yet another, sketch of her; and this is Randall Home. “Do you know, I think they are very like,” said Miss Annie: “you must do my portrait, Menie, darling--you must indeed. I shall take no denial; you shall do me in my white muslin, among my flowers; and we will put Mr. Home’s sweet book on the table, and open it at that scene--that scene, you know, I pointed out to you the other day. I know what inspired him when he wrote that. Come, my love, it will divert you from thinking of this trouble--your mamma should not have told you--shall we begin now! But, Menie, dear, don’t you think you have put a strange look in this face of Mr. Randall? It is like him--but I would not choose you to do me with such an expression as that.”