vivid anticipation. The instruments twanged, the
audience gathered, and at last the music began. Its first effect was to
rouse Hambleton to a sharp attention to details--the director, the people
in the orchestra, the people in the boxes; and then he settled down,
thinking his thoughts. The past, the future, life and its meaning, love
and its power, the long, long thoughts of youth and ambition and desire
came flocking to his brain. The noble confluence of sound that is music
worked upon him its immemorial miracle; his heart softened, his
imagination glowed, his spirit stirred. Time was lost to him--and earth.

The orchestra ceased, but Hambleton did not heed the commotion about him.
The pause and the fresh beginning of the strings scarcely disturbed his
ecstatic reverie. A deep hush lay upon the vast assemblage, broken only
by the voices of the violins. And then, in the zone of silence that lay
over the listening people--silence that vibrated to the memory of the
strings--there rose a little song. To Hambleton, sitting absorbed, it
was as if the circuit which galvanized him into life had suddenly been
completed. He sat up. The singer's lips were slightly parted, and her
voice at first was no more than the half-voice of a flute, sweet, gentle,
beguiling. It was borne upward on the crest of the melody, fuller and
fuller, as on a flooding tide.

"Free of my pain, free of my burden of sorrow,
At last I shall see thee--"

There was freedom in the voice, and the sense of space, of wind on the
waters, of life and the love of life.

Jimsy was a soft-hearted fellow. He never knew what happened to him; but
after uncounted minutes he seemed to be choking, while the orchestra and
the people in boxes and the singer herself swam in a hazy distance. He
shook himself, called somebody he knew very well an idiot, and laughed
aloud in his joy; but his laugh did not matter, for it was drowned in the
roar of applause that reached the roof.

Jim did not applaud. He went outdoors to think about it; and after a
time he found, to his surprise, that he could recall not only the song,
but the singer, quite distinctly. It was a tall, womanly figure, and a
fair, bright face framed abundantly with dark hair, and the least little
humorous twitch to her lips. And her name was Agatha Redmond.

"Of course, she can sing; but it isn't like having the real
thing--'tisn't an alto," said Jimsy ungratefully and just from habit.