For Lilly, those sheets, held together by an india rubber band, lying in the top drawer of the linen-press, were like sacred relics, which radiated and sanctified the household. She reverenced and adored the scrawl of curly-headed black notes, and her earliest recollections were bound up with the melodies they expressed. Lilly's papa, however, objected to his sublime motifs being dragged into the light of common day, and when he caught wife or daughter humming them he would tell them to sing things more on their level. In time there was no need for his remonstrances. Mamma gave up singing altogether, and Lilly withdrew into herself. When she was alone in the house she amused herself by making a kind of drama out of "The Song of Songs," and acting it before the glass. She arrayed herself in sheets and muslin curtains, braided her hair low round her brow, and adorned it with tinsel pins. Then she declaimed, danced, laughed, and cried; went down on her knees and posed in passionate attitudes, acting Solomon's bridal rhapsody, which papa had made live again, after a lapse of twenty-five hundred years, in his great masterpiece. And now that the master had left his manuscript behind him on his disappearance from the house, it became more than ever the keystone of his family's hopes and longings. It was conceivable that he, Bohemian to the core, might cast off his wife and child, emulating the example of his own parents, who had turned him out into the streets at a tender age. But it was not conceivable that he should do anything so preposterous as weakly abandon the great work of his life, the weapon with which he might conquer the world. So the manuscript of "The Song of Songs" reposed in the drawer of the linen-press, which had been saved from the wreck when Frau Czepanek and her daughter moved to a humble attic, where the sewing-machine continued to hum and whir day and night. Here, as a symbol of coming reunion, it spread a miraculous influence around it; while the deserted wife became more withered in face and gaunt in form, and paint could no longer conceal her projecting cheekbones or the hollows beneath her haggard eyes. CHAPTER III In these days Lilly bloomed into a tall, well-developed girl, who carried her satchel of books through the streets to school with the air of a princess. She was generally dressed in a green plaid woollen frock much cockled from rain, which, despite perpetual letting down, always remained too short. Her feet were shod in a pair of down-at-heel and worn boots. She wore woollen gloves, which, pull them up as she would, left below her sleeves a hiatus of bare slender red arm.