athos.

She approached him, driftingly. No sign that he was aware came
from the busied boy, though he coughed again, hollowly now--a
proof that he was an artist. "All right, Hedrick," she said
kindly. "I heard you the first time."

He looked up with utter incomprehension. "I'm afraid I've caught
cold," he said, simply. "I got a good many weeds out before
breakfast, and the ground was damp."

Hedrick was of the New School: everything direct, real, no
striving for effect, no pressure on the stroke. He did his work:
you could take it or leave it.

"You mustn't strain so, dear," returned his sister, shaking her
head. "It won't last if you do. You see this is only the first
day."

Struck to the heart by so brutal a misconception, he put all his
wrongs into one look, rose in manly dignity, picked up his
handkerchief, and left her.

Her eyes followed him, not without remorse: it was an exit which
would have moved the bass-violist of a theatre orchestra. Sighing,
she went to her own room by way of the kitchen and the
back-stairs, and, having locked her door, brought the padlocked
book from its hiding-place.

"I think I should not have played as I did, an hour ago," she
wrote. "It stirs me too greatly and I am afraid it makes me
inclined to self-pity afterward, and I must never let myself feel
_that_! If I once begin to feel sorry for myself. . . . But I
_will_ not! No. You are here in the world. You exist. You _are_!
That is the great thing to know and it must be enough for me. It
is. I played to You. I played _just love_ to you--all the yearning
tenderness--all the supreme kindness I want to give you. Isn't
love really just glorified kindness? No, there is something more.
. . . I feel it, though I do not know how to say it. But it was in
my playing--I played it and played it. Suddenly I felt that in my
playing I had shouted it from the housetops, that I had told the
secret to all the world and _everybody_ knew. I stopped, and for a
moment it seemed to me that I was dying of shame. But no one
understood. No one had even listened. . . . Sometimes it seems to
me that I am like Cora, that I am very deeply her sister in some
things. My heart goes all to You--my revelation of it, my release
of it, my outlet of it is all here in these pages (except when I
play as I did to-day and as I shall not play again) and perhaps
the writing keeps me quiet. Cora scatters her own releasings: she
is looking for the You she may never fi