e gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft
under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old
floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled
near the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no
impatience, however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put
them together carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of
the grand piano, anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from
the stand.

The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows, half
a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano. There
were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners and
was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like
stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice
under her fingers.

In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and
armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance
of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could
reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.

The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that
the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed
the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let
the initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had
been made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what;
and it revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of
trunks. The girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and
looked at the trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A
door slammed down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into
one of those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she
rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.

The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells,
a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite "Arlesienne"
will serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from
"Siegfried" will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more
than once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of
early rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with
stiffened fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a
stove, and sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once
p