tly.
"You are right," he says, gravely, "--there _might_ be somebody
listening who could not enter into our real feelings. And now, how about
those music-lessons?"

"I don't want any more, thank you," says FLORA, coldly. "While we are
all in mourning for our poor, dear absurd EDDY, it seems like a
perfectly ridiculous mockery to be practicing the scales."

Fanning himself with his straw hat, Mr. BUMSTEAD shakes his bushy head
several times. "You do not discriminate sufficiently," he replies.
"There are kinds of music which, when performed rapidly upon the violin,
fife, or kettle-drum, certainly fill the mind with sentiments
unfavorable to the deeper anguish of human sorrow. Of such, however, is
not the kind made by young girls, which is at all times a help to the
intensity of judicious grief. Let me assure you, with the candor of an
idolized friend, that some of the saddest hours of my life have been
spent in teaching you to try to sing a humorous aria from DONIZETTI; and
the moments in which I have most sincerely regretted ever having been
born were those in which you have played, in my hearing, the
Drinking-song from _La Traviata_. Believe me, then, my devoted pupil,
there can be nothing at all inconsistent with a prevalence of profound
melancholy in your continued piano-playing; whereas, on the contrary,
your sudden and permanent cessation might at least surprise your friends
and the neighborhood into a light-heartedness temporarily oblivious of
the memory of that dear, missing boy, to whom you could not, I hear,
give the love already bestowed upon me."

"I loved him ridiculously, absurdly, with my whole heart," cries FLORA,
not altogether liking what she has heard. "I'm real sorry, too, that
they think somebody has killed him."

Mr, BUMSTEAD folds his brown linen arms as he towers before her, and the
dark circles around his eyes appear to shrink with the intensify of his
gaze.

"There are occasions in life," he remarks, "when to acknowledge that our
last meeting with a friend, who has since mysteriously disappeared, was
to reject him and imply a preference for his uncle, may be calculated to
associate us unpleasantly with that disappearance, in the minds of the
censorious, and invite suspicions tending to our early cross-examination
by our Irish local magistrate. I do not say, of course, that you
actually destroyed my nephew for fear he should try to prejudice me
against you; but I cannot withhold my earnest a