t, it occurred to her that she had a voice,--a contralto of
no very great compass or cultivation, but singularly sweet and touching;
and she finally obtained position in a church-choir. She held it for
three months, greatly to her pecuniary advantage, and, it is said, much
to the satisfaction of the gentlemen in the back-pews, who faced toward
her during the singing of the last hymn.

I remember her quite distinctly at this time. The light that slanted
through the oriel of St. Dives choir was wont to fall very tenderly on
her beautiful head with its stacked masses of deerskin-colored hair, on
the low black arches of her brows, and to deepen the pretty fringes
that shaded her eyes of Genoa velvet. Very pleasant it was to watch
the opening and shutting of that small straight mouth, with its quick
revelation of little white teeth, and to see the foolish blood faintly
deepen her satin cheek as you watched. For Mrs. Tretherick was very
sweetly conscious of admiration, and, like most pretty women, gathered
herself under your eye like a racer under the spur.

And then, of course, there came trouble. I have it from the soprano,--a
little lady who possessed even more than the usual unprejudiced judgment
of her sex,--that Mrs. Tretherick's conduct was simply shameful; that
her conceit was unbearable; that, if she considered the rest of the
choir as slaves, she (the soprano) would like to know it; that her
conduct on Easter Sunday with the basso had attracted the attention of
the whole congregation; and that she herself had noticed Dr. Cope
twice look up during the service; that her (the soprano's) friends had
objected to her singing in the choir with a person who had been on the
stage, but she had waived this. Yet she had it from the best authority
that Mrs. Tretherick had run away from her husband, and that this
red-haired child who sometimes came in the choir was not her own. The
tenor confided to me behind the organ, that Mrs. Tretherick had a way
of sustaining a note at the end of a line in order that her voice might
linger longer with the congregation,--an act that could be attributed
only to a defective moral nature; that as a man (he was a very popular
dry-goods clerk on week-days, and sang a good deal from apparently
behind his eyebrows on the sabbath)--that as a man, sir, he would put up
with it no longer. The basso alone--a short German with a heavy voice,
for which he seemed reluctantly responsible, and rather grieved