He remembered every look, almost every dress she had ever worn,--the dark neutral-tinted one that night, the white at Richmont, and now the glimmer of blue ribbons among the curls,---- After a time Miss Hadley, who sat there patient with her knitting, like a cat watching a mouse, was called away for something and had to leave them reluctantly. And then it is undeniable that Frank took advantage of her absence and stole a little closer to the piano. He even interrupted Alice ruthlessly in the midst of her sonata. ‘Play me this,’ he said, humming the bars that haunted him. He was even so bold as to approach his hand to the piano and run over the notes. ‘It was the first thing I had ever heard you play,’ the young man added; ‘I have done nothing but sing it ever since. Ah, forgive me for stopping you! Let me hear it again.’ ‘It is very lovely,’ faltered Alice, stooping her head over the keys; and then by chance their eyes met and they knew---- What? Neither said another word. Alice’s fingers flew at the keys with the precipitancy of haste and fear. She spoiled the air, her heart beating so loud as to drown both tune and time. As the notes rushed out headlong after each other, an indifferent looker-on would have concluded poor Alice to be a school-girl in the fullest musical sense of the word. But Frank, though he was a connoisseur, never found it out. He sat down behind her listening with a perfect imbecility of admiration. It might have been St. Cecilia, it might have been the angels playing in heaven whom Cecilia heard. To him it was a strain divine. To think that he had not known of Alice’s existence when he heard these notes first! He began to babble in the midst of the music, quite unconscious of doing anything amiss. ‘When I heard you play that first I had never seen you,’ he said, and though Alice was at the crisis of the melody her hand slackened and lightened to listen. ‘I could not think who it could be. I thought you must be the sick one of the family or something. And then, when your mother called you and you came and stood in the door----’ Alice now stopped altogether and did her best to laugh. ‘What a very good memory you must have,’ she said. ‘I am sure I could not have remembered all that.’ ‘Yes; I have a good memory,--for some things,’ said Frank, while she half unconsciously kept running on with one hand among the treble keys, half drowning his voice, half making an accompaniment to it. ‘Your mother spoke of you in such a tone--I understand it now, but it bewildered me at the time, I thought you must be ill--or--sickly--or something. And then she called Alice, and you appeared under the curtains; I can see it all as plain as if it had happened yesterday. Laurie chattering enough for six with his back turned, and you standing in the doorway like----’