to a skeleton as the last week crept to its
close, and here you are robust and well to do as usual. I call it
unfeeling," says Miss Massereene, reproachfully, "and I don't believe
you care a pin about me."

"Would you like to see me 'reduced to a skeleton'?" asks Luttrell,
reproachfully. "You talk as though you had been done out of something;
but a man may be horribly cut up about a thing without letting all the
world know of it."

"You conceal it with great skill," says Molly, placing her hand beneath
his chin, under a pretense of studying his features, but in reality to
compel him to look at her; and, as it is impossible for any one to gaze
into another's eyes for any length of time without showing emotion of
some kind, presently he laughs.

"Ah!" cries she, well pleased, "now I have made you laugh, your little
attack of the spleens will possibly take to itself wings and fly away."

All through the remainder of this day and the whole of the next--which
is his last--she is sweetness itself to him. Whatever powers of
tormenting she possesses are kept well in the background, while she
betrays nothing but a very successful desire to please.

She wanders with him contentedly through garden and lawn; she sits
beside him; at dinner she directs swift, surreptitious smiles at him
across the flowers; later on she sings to him his favorite songs; and
why she scarcely knows. Perhaps through a coquettish desire to make the
parting harder; perhaps to make his chains still stronger; perhaps to
soothe his evident regret; perhaps (who can say?) because she too feels
that same regret.

And surely to-night some new spirit is awake within her. Never has she
sung so sweetly. As her glorious voice floats through the dimly-lighted
room and out into the more brilliant night beyond, Luttrell, and
Letitia, and John sit entranced and wonder secretly at the great gift
that has been given her.

"If ever words are sweet, what, what is song
When lips we love the melody prolong!"

Molly in every-day life is one thing; Molly singing divinely is
another. One wonders curiously, when hearing her, how anything so gay,
so _debonnaire_ as she, can throw such passion into words, such
thrilling tenderness, such wild and mournful longing.

"Molly," cries John impatiently from the balcony, "I cannot bear to
hear you sing like that. One would think your heart was broken. Don't
do it, child."

And Molly laughs lightly, and bursts into a bar