r lady afterwards protested--she had time to realize what she was
undertaking.

"Certainly. Why not?" confirmed her husband. "We badly want some more
items on the programme. I shall put you down for two solos."

"But what _can_ I play?" remonstrated Mrs. Fleming.

"Oh, Mother, you know heaps of things! Don't be absurd!" reproved Meg.

"I guess we'll have a rehearsal to-night, and choose your star pieces,"
said Diana, with shining eyes.

So far, so good. Her plot had answered admirably. The family took it
almost as a matter of course that "Mother" was to perform at the
concert, though it had never occurred to any of them to ask her to do
so.

"She's a very good pianist," said Meg airily to Diana.

"Glad you think so!" rapped out Diana, with an emphasis that made Meg
stare and whisper afterwards to Elsie that she couldn't quite somehow
get at the back of "Stars and Stripes".

It was a mighty matter to select the two solos. Mrs. Fleming, flustered
and bewildered at this unexpected dive into publicity, hesitated among
many pieces. As she could not make up her own mind, Diana made it up for
her.

"We want the 'Moonlight Sonata' for one, and Chopin's 'Ballade in A
flat' for the other," she decided. "They're classical, but they're so
exquisite that I guess even the old women will enjoy them. Then for the
encores you could play----"

"Encores!" gasped Mrs. Fleming feebly.

"Why, of course there'll be encores! Schubert's 'Hedge Roses' for one,
and that nocturne of your own for the other. It'll just about take the
house!"

So Mrs. Fleming, with an extraordinary feeling that she had somehow been
whisked back to her school-days, sat practising in the drawing-room,
with Diana, curled up in the corner of the sofa for audience. It was a
dream-world for them both. Diana had been reading _Stories of the Great
Composers_, and now she knew the hearts of the musicians she could enter
more fully into the meaning of their music. She had fallen, utterly and
entirely, under the magic spell of Chopin; the lovely, liquid melodies
thrilled her like the echo of something beyond her earthly experience,
and seemed to go soaring away into regions she had not yet explored,
regions of breathless beauty, though only entered by the gates of
sorrow. She would read Alfred Noyes's poem on Chopin as she sat
listening to the haunting, bewitching rhythm of the "Ballade in A", and
the ring of the poetry merged itself into the glamour of the music