to go with the raggle-taggle gipsies-O! The thing that
was sending Terry Platt away was much more than a conjugal quarrel
precipitated by a soft-boiled egg and a flap of the arm. It went so much
deeper that if psychology had not become a cant word we might drag it
into the explanation. It went so deep that it's necessary to delve back
to the days when Theresa Platt was Terry Sheehan to get the real
significance of it, and of the things she did after she went.

When Mrs. Orville Platt had been Terry Sheehan she had played the piano,
afternoons and evenings, in the orchestra of the Bijou theatre, on Cass
street, Wetona, Wisconsin. Any one with a name like Terry Sheehan would,
perforce, do well anything she might set out to do. There was nothing of
genius in Terry, but there was something of fire, and much that was
Irish. The combination makes for what is known as imagination in
playing. Which meant that the Watson Team, Eccentric Song and Dance
Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played the Bijou. Ruby
Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Monday performance,
sheet-music in hand, and say, "Listen, dearie. We've got some new
business I want to wise you to. Right here it goes '_Tum_ dee-dee _dum_
dee-dee _tum dum dum_. See? Like that. And then Jim vamps. Get me?"

Terry, at the piano, would pucker her pretty brow a moment. Then, "Like
this, you mean?"

"That's it! You've got it."

"All right. I'll tell the drum."

She could play any tune by ear, once heard. She got the spirit of a
thing, and transmitted it. When Terry played a march number you tapped
the floor with your foot, and unconsciously straightened your shoulders.
When she played a home-and-mother song that was heavy on the minor wail
you hoped that the man next to you didn't know you were crying (which he
probably didn't, because he was weeping, too).

At that time motion pictures had not attained their present virulence.
Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by the
ubiquitous film. The Bijou offered entertainment of the cigar-box tramp
variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes in slightly
soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpy legs who tossed
each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes.

Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semi-professional tone. The more
conservative of her townspeople looked at her askance. There never had
been an evil thing about Terry, but Wetona conside