y.

"He'll fall in love with Di," said Ina.

"And what of that? Little daughter will have many a man fall in love
with her, _I_ should say."

"Yes, but, Dwight, what do you think of him?"

"What do I think of him? My dear Ina, I have other things to think of."

"But we don't know anything about him, Dwight--a stranger so."

"On the other hand," said Dwight with dignity, "I know a good deal about
him."

With a great air of having done the fatherly and found out about this
stranger before bringing him into the home, Dwight now related a number
of stray circumstances dropped by Cornish in their chance talks.

"He has a little inheritance coming to him--shortly," Dwight wound up.

"An inheritance--really? How much, Dwight?"

"Now isn't that like a woman. Isn't it?"

"I _thought_ he was from a good family," said Ina.

"My mercenary little pussy!"

"Well," she said with a sigh, "I shouldn't be surprised if Di did really
accept him. A young girl is awfully flattered when a good-looking older
man pays her attention. Haven't you noticed that?"

Dwight informed her, with an air of immense abstraction, that he left
all such matters to her. Being married to Dwight was like a perpetual
rehearsal, with Dwight's self-importance for audience.

A few evenings later, Cornish brought up the music. There was something
overpowering in this brown-haired chap against the background of his
negligible little shop, his whole capital in his few pianos. For he
looked hopefully ahead, woke with plans, regarded the children in the
street as if, conceivably, children might come within the confines of
his life as he imagined it. A preposterous little man. And a
preposterous store, empty, echoing, bare of wall, the three pianos near
the front, the remainder of the floor stretching away like the corridors
of the lost. He was going to get a dark curtain, he explained, and
furnish the back part of the store as his own room. What dignity in
phrasing, but how mean that little room would look--cot bed, washbowl
and pitcher, and little mirror--almost certainly a mirror with a wavy
surface, almost certainly that.

"And then, you know," he always added, "I'm reading law."

The Plows had been asked in that evening. Bobby was there. They were,
Dwight Herbert said, going to have a sing.

Di was to play. And Di was now embarked on the most difficult feat of
her emotional life, the feat of remaining to Bobby Larkin the lure, the
beloved lure, t