 CHAPTER 27 The Summers' Story After this, Louis Anstead steadily failed. It had seemed as though he summoned all the strength left in his worn-out body for that one interview wherein he had resolved that his mother should know the truth from his lips. After that, the lamp of life burned lower and lower. He rallied again two days afterward and was locked in with his lawyer and gave critical attention to business. I imagine that he made important changes in his will, Mr. Chesney said to Claire. I do not know of what character, though I was called in as a witness. I hope he made special provision for his sister Alice. I think that she is likely to disappoint her parents in their schemes and it might be greatly to her benefit to be independent so far as property is concerned. But Louis kept his own counsel. His lawyer told me that he might be failing in body, but he had never seen him clearer in brain. So there will be no trouble about carrying out whatever he has planned. I did not know, Claire said, that he had property to leave independent of his parents. Oh yes, a large estate willed to him from his grandfather absolutely in his own right. It is what has helped to ruin him. How good it would be if he could make his money undo so far as money could, some of the mischief he has done. How could money undo it, my friend? Oh, it couldn't. Still, it might relieve the misery which comes from want. I was thinking just then of poor little Mrs. Simpson and her fatherless baby. I have heard that her husband drank his first glass while in Louis Anstead's employ and that Louis offered it to him and he did not like to refuse for fear of giving offence. He died with the delirium tremens and his wife sold her bed clothes and her shoes to buy food for him at the last. Perhaps she would rather starve than take money from poor Louis. But I heard that he was connected with one of the distilleries. Some of his property is invested in that way. Mr. Chesney answered, startled with the remembrance. I had not thought of it. Poor Alice, I am afraid there is great trouble for her in whatever direction one looks. If Louis leaves his property to her, her father and mother will violently oppose what her intense temperance principles would advocate. I wish Louis had felt like talking these things over with me a little. Well, the day came when they followed the ruined body to the grave. It rested in a costly coffin and the funeral appointments were such as became large wealth and the habit of lavish expenditure. Later, when the will was read, it appeared that the poor heart had taken counsel of one who makes no mistakes. He had done what he could do to undo wrong. The income from valuable investments was large and was left in trust to his sister Alice to be used at her discretion in relieving the woes of those who had been brought low through the influence of intoxicants. As for the distillery from which half of his income was derived, its business was immediately to cease, its stock was to be destroyed, and its buildings to be made into tenement houses for the poor. The poor boy was not in his right mind when he made such a will, the father said. Why, it is a sinful waste. It is simply throwing thousands of dollars into the river. It is all the influence of that Benedict girl, the mother said, in bitterness of spirit. But the will stood and its directions were obeyed with all the promptness that the sister to whose trust the work was left could force her lawyers. She seemed in feverish haste to have the work of destruction go on. And when her mother accused her of being hopelessly under the influence of that Benedict girl and having no mind of her own, her answer was, Mama, you are mistaken. At last I am under the influence of one who has a right to own me, body and soul. Poor Louis found him at last and yielded to his power and followed his direction, and it was through Clare Benedict's influence that he did. And Mama, if he had known Clare Benedict a few years earlier, we should have him with us today. Mama, the time has come for me to speak plainly. Religion has been nothing but a name to me until lately. I have not believed in its power. It is Clare Benedict who has shown me my mistake and helped me to see Christ as a sufficient savior. I belong to him now for time and eternity, and Mama, I will never marry a man who does not with his whole heart own Christ as his master, and who is not as intense and fanatical on the temperance question as my brother became. She had always been strong-willed. The mother had been want to say, somewhat boastfully, that the oldest daughter resembled her in strength of purpose. Human nature is a curious study. What Mrs. Anstead would do had been a matter of extreme solicitude to several people. Mr. Chesney believed that she would make Alice's life miserable and that she would become Clare Benedict's enemy and injure her if she could, and that she would withdraw her younger daughters from not only Clare's but their eldest sister's influence and from the church to which they had become attached. I do not mean that she will do this in revenge, he said to Clare, or that she will really intend to injure anybody. She is one of those persons who can make herself believe that she is doing God's service by just such management as this. I am sorry for Alice and for the young girls. It gives me a sense of relief and joy to remember that Lewis is forever safe from pitfalls, and yet sometimes I cannot help wishing that he could have lived for a few months longer. He had great influence over his mother. She tried to manage him, and his indolent will allowed himself to be influenced in a wonderful manner, but when he did really rouse he had great power over his mother. Mrs. Anstead did none of the things which were feared. Instead she turned suddenly and with apparent loathing from the life which she had heretofore lived. She sent for Clare one morning, greeted her with a burst of tears as her dear child, and declared that she had understood the feeling between Lewis and herself, nothing would have given her greater joy than to have welcomed her into the family. Clare opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again. If this were the form of cross that she was to bear, it was peculiar certainly. But why not bear it as well as any other? Of what used to explain again what the son's own lips had told that she had utterly refused the honor offered her, that she had never for a moment desired to be received into this family? If the bereaved mother had really succeeded in making herself believe such folly as this, why not let it pass? The grave had closed over the possibility of its ever being realized. It was a strange part to play. To accept without outward protest the position of one who would have been a daughter of the house to hear herself mentioned as Lewis Anstead's intended wife, to ride and walk and talk with the mother and help her make believe that she would not for the world have thwarted her son's desires. But Clare, after a few attempts at explanation, dropped the effort. The mother did not wish to believe the truth about this or many other things and therefore closed her eyes to them. She wished also to impress herself and others with the belief that Lewis had been in every respect, an exemplary and indeed a remarkable young man. She withdrew her connection from the church in town and united by letter with the one at South Plains, avowedly because dear Lewis was interested in it more than in any other church in the world. She imagined plans that he might have had for the church and called them his and eagerly worked them out. She adopted the minister and his wife and his children because she had often heard Lewis say that he would rather hear that man preach than to hear Dr. Archer. And once he told her that the minister's little girl had a very sweet face and was a cunning little witch whom he liked to tease. She turned with something like disgust from the very name of Van Martyr, protesting that poor Lewis had had a great deal to bear from their advances and that she had no desire to cultivate their acquaintance further. In all these strange changes in her mother, Alice looked with bewilderment. She frightens me, she said to Claire one evening. I don't know what to think. She contradicts every theory of life I ever heard her express. She attributes to Lewis graces that he did not possess. She accuses people of injuring him, who really tried to help him, and she adopts as plans of his things of which I know he had not even thought. I do not know my mother at all, and as I said, it frightens me. Is she losing her mind? Claire had no ready reply to these questionings, for she, too, was puzzled. But Mr. Chesney, as they walked slowly from the house on the hill, discussing once more the strange change in the woman of the world, advanced a theory which Claire adopted, but which was hardly the one to explain to Alice. I think, said Mr. Chesney, that she is hushing her conscience. It would like to speak loudly to her and tell her that she is responsible for a ruined life, and she does not mean to listen to it. She is imagining a life she believes Lewis might have lived after the change that came to him on his sick bed, and is making herself believe that he did live it, and that she was and is in hearty accord with it. It is a strange freak of the bewildering human mind, but unless I am mistaken, the woman will not find the peace in it that she is seeking. I think she will have to cry, God be merciful to me as sinner, before her heart will find rest. And then he added one sentence which set Claire's heart into a strange flutter. Claire, when I see the energy with which she carries out one of her imaginings connected with you, I am very grateful that Lewis insisted on my being present at that first interview between you and him, and that I heard the truth from his own lips, for the mother is succeeding in deceiving everyone else. And I do not know how to help it, Claire said with troubled voice. It seems a strange thing to be living a falsehood, but when I try to explain to her, she puts me gently aside and acts as though I had not spoken, and others have no right to question me about the truth of her theories. Except myself, have I the right? Was it as emphatic or refusal as poor Lewis understood it? Believe me, I am not asking merely to satisfy idle curiosity. There never was anything in it, Mr. Chesney, and there never could have been. The passage of all these and many other events not chronicled here consumed the greater portion of the summer vacation, for Claire Benedict was letting the summer slip from her without going home. Sore had been the trial at first, but a few weeks before the term closed, opportunity had been offered her to teach a summer class of city pupils at prices that were almost equal to her year's salary. What right had she, who wanted to bestow so many luxuries on her mother, to close her eyes to such an opportunity as this merely because she was homesick for a sight of that mother's face? It had been hard to reconcile the sister especially to this new state of things. The gentle mother had long ago learned the lesson that what looked like manifest duty must not be tampered with, no matter how hard to bear. But the hot-hearted young sister refused to see anything in it except an added trial too great to be born. Many letters had to be written before there was a final reluctant admission that two hundred dollars more to depend on, paltries some though it was, would make a great difference with the mother's winter comforts. The letter in which poor Dora admitted this was blistered with tears, but the sacrifice was made and the extra term had been well entered upon. There was much outside of the class and the life being lived on the hill to occupy Clare's thoughts. I hope you do not suppose that the work on the part of the girls had been accomplished during a sort of spasm and that now they were ready to drop back into inaction. Nothing was farther from their thoughts. If you have imagined so, you have not understood how thoroughly some of them had sacrificed in order to do. We never forget that for which we sacrifice. Besides, the habit of thinking first of the church and the various causes which are the tributaries of the church was formed, that the work was to go on was demonstrated in many ways, not the least by the random remarks which came so naturally from the lips of the workers. Girls, had Ruth Jennings said, when they lingered one morning after prayer meeting, when we cushion these seats we shall have to send somebody after the material who can carry the carpet and wallpaper in his mind's eye. It will never do to have a false note put in here to jar this harmony. When we cushion the seats, Clare heard it and laughed softly, who had said that the seats were ever to be cushioned, but she knew they would be and that before very long. On another evening, Mary Burton had said, look here, don't you think our very next thing, or at least one of the next, ought to be a furnace? I don't like those stovepipes if they are rasha. A furnace would heat more evenly and with less dust, and Bud could manage a furnace as well as he can these stoves. How naturally they talked about their future sacrifices, what would have utterly appalled them a few months before, were spoken of carelessly now as next things. Ruth Jennings readily assented to the necessity for a furnace, but added, I don't believe we shall have Bud for engineer. He wants to go to school, did you know it? And what is more, Mrs. Anstead intends to send him. Fanny told me about it last night. She says her mother thinks Louis intended that Bud should have an education, and she wants to carry out all his plans. I did not know that Louis Anstead ever had any such plans, did you? And Netty Burdick after a thoughtful pause. Oh, well, girls, if we can't have Bud for engineer, perhaps we can have him to preach for us some day. He told me last night that if he lived he meant to preach, and I believe he will, and preach well, too. Just think of it, Bud, a minister. CHAPTER XXVIII. A FAMILY SECRET You are not to suppose that during this press of work the moving spirit in it did not have her homesick hours when it seemed to her that she must fly to her mother and that at once, that she did not have her anxious hours when to provide as she would like for that dear mother and that beautiful young sister seemed a dreary impossibility, that she did not have her discouraged hours when new carpet and frescoing and stained glass windows seemed only vanity of vanities, and the sharp-toned cabinet organ seemed to wheeze loud enough to drive all other improvements out of mind. But there was always this comfort. She was much too busy to brood long or often over thoughts like these. And another thing, weary and disheartened as some rainy evening might find her, there was forever an undertone of thanksgiving about Bud and Harry Matthews, not only, but about others as well. Not accepting several of the girls, who, though Christians before she knew them, had stepped upon higher planes of thought and action, been revitalized indeed in their Christian life, and would never go back to the follies of the past. Then came the trouble in the Anstead home and the weeks of waiting and watching and the final defeat which was still a triumph. During the salemnities of those hours things which had seemed like trials sank into trivialities, and life grew to her more earnest and solemn than ever before. In all these ways the summer waned, and now changes of various kinds were pending. Harry Matthews was about closing his engagement with the telegraph company to enter upon a secretary ship under his uncle, a position involving grave responsibilities and conscientious stewardship. What joy it was to remember that the new young man was equal to the trust. Bud was to be regularly entered as a pupil at the academy, and his face was radiant. The Ansteads were to stay at South Plains all winter, and the girls were happy over the prospect of uniting with the little church at its coming communion. Mrs. Anstead had subscribed a hundred-dollar addition to the minister's salary, and told the people that they ought to feel disgraced for not each giving doubly the original amount. That her son Louis, she felt sure, would have taken the matter up had he lived, and she could not rest until she sighed accomplished. Meantime, there was more or less gossip in the town, of course, about affairs with which the people, if they had really stopped to think, had nothing to do. Among other things, there was wonderment as to why Harold Chesney came to South Plains so often. What business was there in this direction which could require so much attention? To be sure, he was one of the directors of the railroad, but this branch of it had not here too far been considered so important as to need constant looking after by its chief. Also, there were some who thought it very strange that that Miss Benedict should receive so many attentions from him, and she was as good as Louis Anstead's widow. Of course that was so, for Mrs. Anstead herself had as good as said so dozens of times, and see how intimate she was with the entire family. Yes, they knew that Harold Chesney was a very particular friend of Louis Anstead, but they should think that would hardly account for such a degree of intimacy when Louis had only been buried a few weeks. Meantime, the central figures of this anxious talk went their busy ways and seemed in no sense troubled by the tongues. Harold Chesney came often, and always visited the Ansteads and the Academy, and the intimacy between all parties seemed to increase instead of diminish. It was about this time that Clare received an unusually lengthy letter from Dora, a letter over which she laughed much, and also shed some tears. Dora had some family perplexities to ask advice about, and indulged rather more than was her want over four boldings in regard to the coming winter. Then suddenly she launched into the main channel of her letter after this fashion. Oh, Clare, my dear, you are good! If I could be half like you, or even one-third, it would be such a relief to Mama as well as to myself. But, Clare, this next that I am going to say is mean and small, and will serve to show you that I have a correct estimate of myself. I cannot help thinking that it would be much easier for me to be good if I were a way off in south plains, or north mountains, or anywhere else than here, right around the corner from the old home. Do you have any conception of what a difference it makes to be around the corner from things instead of being on the same street with them? I think it possible that I might throw myself intensely into plans for that north mountain church, you know, if I were there, and forget this one, and these people, and the old ways. Clare, part of the time I am pretty good. I am indeed. But really and truly it is hard. The girls tried to be good too, some of them. Occasionally I think if they did not try so hard I could get along better. You see, they stopped talking about things when I appear, for fear I will be hurt, and I am hurt. But it is because they think I will be foolish enough to care for what they have been saying. Do you understand that? It reads as though there were no sense in it, but I know what I mean. It is clothes half the time. Clothes are dreadful. I find I had no conception of their cost. Not that I am having any new ones. Don't be frightened, dear. I am not so lost to a sense of what has befallen us as such a proceeding would indicate. Why, even a pair of gloves is often beyond my means. Neither am I complaining. It is not the gloves. I am quite willing to go without them. If Mama could have the things which we used to consider necessities for her, I would be willing to go bare-handed for the rest of my days. Well, what am I talking about? Let me see if I can put it into words. The girls, you know, are always arranging them for this and that entertainment. I meet them oftener, now that you have insisted on my going back to the music class. To some of these entertainments I am invited, and to more of them I am not. I never go on account of clothes and some other things. Imagine a party of girls gathered in the music room or the hall in full tide of talk about what they will wear and how they will arrange their hair and their ribbons and all that sort of thing. And imagine a sudden silence settling over them because I have appeared in sight, as though I were a grim fairy before whom it was their misfortune to have to be forever silent about everything that was pretty or cost money. Now I am going to make a confession, and I know it is just as silly as can be, but sometimes I cannot help rushing home and running up to my room and locking my door and crying as though my heart would break. I am thoughtful though about choosing times and occasions for these outbreaks. I generally select an afternoon when Mama is out executing some of your numerous commissions, but even then I have to bathe my eyes for half an hour so that the poor, dear, sweet, patient woman will know nothing about it. I never do let her know, Claire. She thinks that I am good and happy, and occasionally she tells me that I am growing self-controlled like you, and then I feel like a hypocrite, but all the same for her own good I don't enlighten her. Claire, dear, don't you suppose it is the silly parties to which I do not go which trouble me. I have not the slightest desire to go, and I don't think of them often. I don't, really. Well, that about having no desire needs qualifying. I mean I would not have if I could go. I mean I should like to be perfectly able to go if I chose, and then to choose to remain at home. Do you understand? If the girls would only be free and social and talk with me as though nothing had happened, I should learn not to care. But it is so hard to always feel that people are saying, Hush, there she comes, poor thing. Don't talk about it now, or we shall hurt her feelings. I would rather have them drop me entirely, I believe, as Estelle Mitchell has done. She doesn't bow to me any more, even when we meet face to face. Doesn't see me, you know, but she does even that politely. I don't know how she manages. Claire, do you remember the time Papa signed that ten thousand dollar note for her father? Well, never mind. I am writing a silly and a wicked letter. I haven't written so to you before, have I? I'll tell you what has stirred me so lately. Everybody is in a flutter about the house. Claire, it is sold. You know what house I mean. The dear old one on the avenue, every separate stone of which speaks of Papa, that Mr. Chesney bought it, who spends half of his time abroad. There is a rumor that he is to be married sometime, nobody seems to know just when, and bring his bride there to live. It is well for me that I shall not have a chance to move in her circle, for I feel almost certain that I should have to hate her a little. It is very absurd, of course, but the girls are actually beginning already to talk about the possible reception, though they don't even know who the prospective bride is. Some have located her in Chicago and some in Europe. I cannot discover that there is an absolute certainty about there being any bride, and yet some of the young ladies are planning what would be pretty and unique to wear. Estelle Mitchell is sure of being invited because her brother Dick used to be quite intimately acquainted with one of the Chesney family, and Dora Benedict is sure of not being invited because she is not intimately acquainted with anybody any more. I wonder who will have our rooms, our dear old rooms. Yes, that largest blot is a tear. I couldn't help it, and I haven't time to copy and could not afford to waste the paper if I had. I don't cry very often, but I was foolish enough to walk by the blessed old home this morning and look up at the open window in Papa's study. Oh, Claire, darling, I wish you could come home if it is only for a little while, and we could go away from here. Don't you think Mama might be made comfortable in south plains for the winter? Oh, that is foolish, I know, and you are a dear, brave, self-sacrificing sister to give up your vacation and work away all summer to help support us. Tomorrow I shall not care anything about this, only to be dreadfully ashamed that I sent you this wicked letter. I am going down now to make tea and a bit of cream toast for mother, and I shall be as bright as a gold eagle and hover around her like a mothmiller in the gaslight, and tell her all sorts of pleasant nothings and never a word of the house or the sale or the possible new mistress for the old home. I am learning, dear, though from this letter you might not think it, but I live such a pent up everyday life that I have to say things to you once in a while else what would become of me? Claire laughed a great deal over this letter, pitiful as the undertone in it must have been to a sympathetic heart. The tears came once or twice, but after all the predominant feeling seemed to be amusement. It was not answered promptly. In fact, she waited three days. Then came Mr. Chesney for one of his brief visits, and she read the letter aloud to him. What Dora would have thought could she have seen that proceeding passes my imagination. What would she have thought of human sympathy could she have heard the bursts of laughter over parts of it, albeit Mr. Chesney did once or twice brush away a tear. What would she have thought could she have heard the conversation which followed. Now, my dear Claire, I hope you are convinced of your hard-heartedness. Poor Dora ought not to have the strain kept on her during the autumn, especially when it is so utterly unnecessary. The house will be in complete order in a few weeks time, and Dora's reception is just the thing. I can write to Philips and put every arrangement into his hands, and we can appoint Dora, manager-in-chief. Claire, I have a plan worth a dozen of yours. Let us have the mother and Dora here for a visit. They want to see the little church which they have helped to build. Nothing could be pleasanter. Then all your girls and all your boys could be present at the ceremony. Think what it would be for Bud. He would never forget it. Neither would the struggling minister. It would afford an excuse for doing for him just what we want to do. The law does not regulate the amount of marriage fees, you know. Mr. Chesney was an eloquent pleader, and Dora's letter, it must be confessed, pled against the delay that Claire had thought was wise. Of course she demurred. Of course she hinted at the plans that she had formed for getting ready. But the party on the opposite side had an answer for every argument. He was sure that the way to do would be to get ready afterward when she could have leisure and his invaluable presence and advice instead of being hampered with music scholars, and he miles away alone, waiting, and Dora waiting and suffering, and the mother thinking her sad thoughts. Happy surprises were all very well. They were delightful. He was entirely in sympathy with her desire to tell Mama and Dora the story of the new home in person. Only he believed with all his heart that it would be cruel, and therefore wrong, to burden that young heart with the question of ways and means a moment longer than was necessary. As for Mrs. Foster, she could supply Claire's place quietly, and thereby make some poor music teacher's heart unexpectedly glad. Of course Claire was overruled. She had really not one sensible reason to offer why she should remain exiled from Mama and Dora any longer. There was a little feeling of pride, it is true, about the getting ready afterward. But as she looked it over carefully and prayerfully, it seemed even to herself a mean pride unworthy of the woman who was to be Harold Chesney's wife. Then there was a fascination in the thought of Dora planning for that reception, really being the one to invite whom she would among the girls instead of being the one left out in the cold. Also it was pleasant to think what an event it would be to her girls and to bod, and her cheeks glowed over the thought of the marriage fee that would find its way into the lean pocketbook of the overburdened minister. I would like to tell you the whole story in detail, what Dora said when the letter came imploring her mother and herself to come to South Plains for a few weeks' visit, how the mother demurred on the ground of expense, and yet confessed that it made her heart beat wildly to think of getting her arms around Claire again. But I cannot think what has become of the dear child's good sense, she would add with a sigh. Why, Dora dear, she did not come home, you know, because the trip would cost too much, and here she is planning for two of us to take it. Never mind, Mama, would Dora reply, for Dora was desperately determined on this trip to South Plains. Claire has planned away and we shall save our food if we stay two weeks, and that will be something, and she has sent us the tickets, so the money is spent. Oh, Mama, let us go, anyway. And of course they went. Yes, I would delight to tell you all about it, what a sensation there was in South Plains, and how full the little church was, and how well Bud looked walking down the aisle as one of the ushers, and how people said the Ansteads certainly would not come. They would feel it a family insult, but how the Ansteads not only came, but took almost entire charge of everything. Above all, I would like to have you look in with me at the parsonage in the study where the minister and his wife stopped to break the seal of that special envelope after it was all over. How he rubbed his eyes, and looked, and looked again, and turned pale, and said huskily, There is some mistake here, Mary. He has given me the wrong paper. And how she came, and looked over his shoulder, and said, Why, it has your full name. How can there be a mistake? And then she read, Pay to Reverend Henry Ramsey, or Order, $1,000. Whoever heard of such a marriage fee as that? Oh, now I have. There have been just such marriage fees as that, really and truly. There had been such before Harold Chesney and Claire Benedict were married, and there will be such again. There are poor ministers and grand rich men, and there will be, I presume, while the world stands. More things than some people dream of are going on in this world of ours. There is one thing which it gives me great pleasure to record. There was a reception given in the old home. It was after Mama and Dora had been established for several days in their old rooms, and it was the evening after the arrival of the bride and groom, and Estelle Mitchell was invited to the reception. Not because her brother Dick had been intimate with one of the Chesneys, but because my brother Harold gave me the liberty to invite whoever I pleased among my classmates, and it would give me pleasure to see you there. Dora spoke truth. It really gave her great pleasure to see Estelle Mitchell at the wedding reception of the Chesneys and to realize that she was her guest. Oh, you wicked, wicked Dora! some of them said when the excitement caused by the reception cards was at its height. There you heard us talking about the new furniture and wondering as to who was the bride, and you never gave us so much as a hint. Dora laughed and kept her own counsel. She did not choose to tell them that during those trying days no hint of it had come to her. That was their pretty family secret with which outsiders were not to inter-metal. They agreed, every one of them, that Dora made a charming young hostess, and Estelle Mitchell said she was glad she was back in her old home for she just fitted. There are but two things which remain to tell you. One grew out of Ruth Jennings's farewell address to her beloved music teacher, spoken while she was half laughing, half crying, and wholly heartbroken. But the organ does squeak horribly. You know it does, and it is always getting out of tune. Mr. Chesney heard it, and during their wedding trip he said to his wife, There is one thing I want you to help me select. I have not made my thank offering yet to that blessed little church where I found you. It must have an organ that will keep in tune, and that will worthily commemorate the harmony that was begun there. Imagine, please, for I shall not attempt to tell you the delight to say nothing of the unspeakable wonder of the girls and of the entire community when the beautifully finished, exquisitely toned bit of mechanism was set up in the church. Accompanying it were two organ stools, one for the church, and one for Ruth Jennings's home. So she sits on dictionaries and patent office reports no more. The other item can be told more briefly. It is embodied in a sentence which the gentle mother spoke one morning at the breakfast table. By the way, Claire, the committee about the mission-band entertainment was here yesterday while you and Harold were out to see if you would help them. I told them I thought you would. The face of the bride flushed deeply into peculiarly tender light shown in her eyes as she said. How very strange that is. It is the same band which was preparing for that exercise about which I told you. We were to have had it on the day in which Papa was buried. It is the same exercise, Dora said, speaking gently. The girls dropped it entirely and could never persuade themselves to take hold of it again until last week they voted to attempt it. You were only interrupted in your work, you see, Mr. Chesney said, smiling down on eyes that were filling with tears. Interrupted that you might set some wheels in motion that had been clogged. Now you are called back to finish the other, and I am here to help you. End of Chapter 28 Recording by Tricia G.