gs in it you can't kill
out--some lilacs and some tiger-lilies and a darling, ragged, straggling
old strawberry-bush. Outside the fence, hosts of Bouncing Bets--you know
what they are, don't you? The front door has some nice neat blinds,
always closed, like those of the best room, except for weddings and
funerals; but the back door is open, and when you sit on the step you
can look off down an old slope of apple-orchard and over across it at
the neighbors' roofs and chimneys. And there, Geraldino, is where
Auroretta would like to be."

He had the impulse to reach out and touch the ends of his fingers to her
hand, fondly, as one might do to a child, but he prudently refrained.
His eyes, however, dwelled on her with a smile that conveyed sympathy.
He said, after her, amusedly:

"Auroretta!"

She brightened.

"After I've been bad," she said, "I always am blue."

* * * * *

But within the hour he had come near quarreling with her, he also, and
on more than one score.

It began with his making a pleasant remark upon her voice, which seemed
to him worth cultivating. She brushed aside the idea of devoting study
to the art of singing.

"But," she said, "Italo has brought me some songs. He plays them over
and shows me how to sing them. We have lots of fun." To give him an
example, she broke forth, adapting her peculiarly American pronunciation
to Ceccherelli's peculiarly Italian intonations, "'_Non so resistere,
sei troppo bella!_'"

Gerald winced and darkened.

"Then there's this one," she went on, "'_Mia piccirella, deh, vieni
allo mare!_' Do you want to hear me sing it like Miss Felixson,
together with her dog, which always bursts out howling before she's
done? I've heard them three times, and can do the couple of them to a
T."

"Please don't!" he hurriedly requested. "I hope," he added doubtfully,
"that you won't do it to amuse any of your other friends, either." As
she did not quickly assure him that she neither had done, nor ever would
dream of doing, such a low thing, he went on, with the liberty of speech
that amazingly prevailed between them: "Extraordinary as it seems, you
would be perfectly capable of it. And it would be a grave mistake."

"I've done it for Italo when he was playing my accompaniment. For nobody
else."

"Mrs. Hawthorne, if that little man has become your singing-master, will
you not intrust me with the honorable charge of likewise teaching yo