d sailing in summer.

My heart didn't lose a beat and turn over when I saw him coming as did
those of the heroines in Marion Crawford's novels, but we were the best
friends in the world, and I thought that anything else must be a
literary exaggeration, put in to make the story more exciting; just as
the heroine's eyelashes were usually exaggerated to the abnormal length
of an inch to make her more beautiful, though none of the girls I knew
had them like that.

He was a young business man, just starting as assistant to his father
whose business was an old established, comfortable sort of family
affair, big enough to supply, in time, an extra income for an
unambitious young couple like ourselves. Every one congratulated us
heartily, and I began to embroider towels and hem table napkins and to
dream about patterns of flat silver.

The whole arrangement was satisfactory to the point of banality, and I
might be quite an old married woman by this time, but--I had a voice.

Nine-tenths of me, at this age, were the normal, rational
characteristics of a well-brought up, bright, good looking girl. But the
last tenth was an unknown quantity, a great big powerful something which
I vaguely felt, even then, to be the master of all the other tenths, a
force which was capable of having its own way with the rest of me if I
should ever give it a chance. My voice, the agent of this vague power,
had developed rather late. It is true that our whole childhood had been
coloured by music, that we read notes before we could read letters, and
that music was our earliest and most natural mode of expression.

My father's greatest joy in life was music, and he always played
imaginative musical games with us in the evenings. The earliest one I
remember was when we were tiny tots. He used to improvise on the small
organ we had and ask us questions which we had to answer, singing to
his accompaniment. I was Admiral Seymour and Marjorie was General
Wolsey.

I remember his singing,

"And how would you get your ships along, Admiral,
If your sails and oars were shot overboard?"

I sang solemnly,

"I'd shubble them along with shubbles."

Afterwards when I began to sing from printed music with him I remember
saying one evening as he was playing hymns and unfamiliar English
ballads for me to sing,

"Papa, please let me look at the music and follow the notes up and
down."

I really began reading music at four years old. We played