"'Content to wait,'" Mr. Alison echoed meaningly, when the applause had died down. "'Content to wait,'" he repeated. "So long as I know that somebody has received my message." Mary was nearly sure that this was a declaration; but she was not absolutely sure, and she wished that Daisy Harland had not at the last moment telegraphed to say that she could not be with her beloved Mary on her twentieth birthday. "Ah, Miss Flower," Mr. Alison continued, shaking his head. "It would be hard for you to understand the thoughts of a man like myself when he hears a song like that. At the same time, the moral of it surely is that, however far away we may seem from heaven, we are not so far away in reality. We can hope. We can hope, Miss Flower. I wonder if I might venture to say Mary?" "Oh, certainly, please call me Mary," she begged him nervously. "Thank you, Mary." Mr. Alison wished that he could quote a line of poetry about some romantic Mary; but he could only think of _Mary had a little lamb_. And he felt that to sigh this forth with as much passionate emphasis as he could achieve would sound rather silly. "I suppose," he ventured, "you couldn't bring yourself to call me Jemmie? All my chums call me Jemmie. Jemmie Alison. Nobody ever calls me James. Nobody ever did call me James except my grandmother on my father's side. Funny old woman. She simply would not call me Jemmie. She always said the name reminded her of a fright she had in childhood when some burglars broke into her father's house, who of course would have been my great-grandfather. Now that's going back some way. My father died in '72. He was sixty-three then. So he was born in 1809, when my grandmother was twenty-one. That makes her born in 1788. So I suppose this burglary must have happened about 1798. That's a long time ago, isn't it?" "A very long time ago," Mary agreed. She was so much muddled by Mr. Alison's statistics that if he had told her the burglary took place shortly after the Battle of Hastings she would have accepted it as a fact. "I wish the old lady could have lived to meet you, Mary," he went on. "You are just the kind of girl she would have liked me to marry." Luckily for Mary, who did not know what comment she ought to make on this last piece of information, by this time the tenor was off again: _Do you grieve no costly offering To the lady you can make? One there is, and gifts less worthy Queens have stooped to take._ _Take a Heart of virgin silver, Fashion it with heavy blows, Cast it into Love's hot furnace When it fiercest glows._ "Is that your heart or mine?" Mr. Alison asked in a puzzled voice. "I don't quite get that. I mean, is that his heart or hers?" Mary motioned him not to talk, because people were beginning to turn round and peer at the palms among which they were sitting, curious to know what discordant mutter was profaning the music.