e."
She let her beautiful voice linger upon it, caressingly.
"Valentine Corliss."

Hedrick opened his eyes, allowed his countenance to resume its
ordinary proportions, and spoke another name slowly and with
honeyed thoughtfulness:

"Ray Vilas."

This was the shot that told. Cora sprang down from the table with
an exclamation.

Hedrick, subduing elation, added gently, in a mournful whisper:

"_Poor_ old Dick Lindley!"

His efforts to sting his sister were completely successful at
last: Cora was visibly agitated, and appealed hotly to her mother.
"Am I to bear this kind of thing all my life? Aren't you _ever_
going to punish his insolence?"

"Hedrick, Hedrick!" said Mrs. Madison sadly.

Cora turned to the girl by the window with a pathetic gesture.
"Laura----" she said, and hesitated.

Laura Madison looked up into her sister's troubled eyes.

"I feel so morbid," said Cora, flushing a little and glancing
away. "I wish----" She stopped.

The silent Laura set aside her work, rose and went out of the
room. Her cheeks, too, had reddened faintly, a circumstance
sharply noted by the terrible boy. He sat where he was, asprawl,
propped by his arms behind him, watching with acute concentration
the injured departure of Cora, following her sister. At the door,
Cora, without pausing, threw him a look over her shoulder: a
full-eyed shot of frankest hatred.

A few moments later, magnificent chords sounded through the house.
The piano was old, but tuned to the middle of the note, and the
keys were swept by a master hand. The wires were not hammered;
they were touched knowingly as by the player's own fingers, and so
they sang--and from out among the chords there stole an errant
melody. This was not "piano-playing" and not a pianist's
triumphant nimbleness--it was music. Art is the language of a
heart that knows how to speak, and a heart that knew how was
speaking here. What it told was something immeasurably wistful,
something that might have welled up in the breast of a young girl
standing at twilight in an April orchard. It was the inexpressible
made into sound, an improvisation by a master player.

"You hear what she's up to?" said Hedrick, turning his head at
last. But his mother had departed.

He again extended himself flat upon the floor, face downward, this
time as a necessary preliminary to rising after a manner of his
own invention. Mysteriously he became higher in the middle, his
body slowly forming first a