ing you back by five or six. That'll be in time for your little
dinner, won't it now?"

"Perhaps so."

She buried herself again in her libretto. "Mr. Brown," she said after a
minute. "Listen to what the last scene will be. It's a horrid dungeon,
for Manrico and his mother are in prison. As she lies there on her bed
she thinks of the mountains where she was born, and that she and her son
will go back there together and live in peace. When she sings it, just
think about the hills in your own home."

He looked at her in some surprise. "I will," he said, "just the way you
say, and about my mother, too. It all seems real to you, don't it?"

"Very real!"

"Somehow it hasn't to me. I can't seem to think of people standing up
and singing this way if they've anything to tell. It takes so
everlastingly long. Just suppose that when I went to business to-morrow
I should throw my hand out like this," with a broad, forward gesture
that barely missed the head of the lady in front of him, "and sing:

Oh, Mr. Weinstein, it's nine o'clock, sir,
Oh, don't you want me to walk down the block, sir?

And then he'd answer with his arms folded like this:

Oh, Mr. Brown, get on to your job----

And there'd be some swearing in the last line. If you want to get
anything over you've got to drop the poetry business. It isn't real like
a play. Will you go with me to a play next week?"

"Thank you ever so much, but----"

"Oh, drop the 'but.' I'll get the tickets Monday. We'll go to something
jolly."

"I shouldn't enjoy it as much as this. This is the most beautiful, the
most wonderful thing, I've ever seen."

Dick flushed with pleasure and settled in his seat as the curtain rose
upon the last act.

Even he was moved by the _Miserere_, and when the dungeon scene was
reached he whispered, "Golly, I like that, I've heard it on the
hand-organs. I never guessed though that it was about the mountains." He
started to hum it but Hertha gently silenced him, and he was quiet and
attentive until the curtain went down.

"Your first opera, young man?" said the middle-aged gentleman from
behind, whom Hertha had noticed smiling at them.

Dick was helping her with her coat, and he answered as he pulled up her
collar, "Right you are! I'm just that much of a jay."

"Come again," the man said cordially as though the place belonged to
him.

Hertha started to express her gratitude as they stood outside her door
but Dick waved it away. "