something[60] real. I’m sure you can.” There was a hidden compliment in his tone, and Mary was surprised. The soldier had almost forgotten that he did not belong there. He was acting as he might have acted in his own social sphere.

[60]

Mary struck a few chords tenderly on the piano, and then broke into the delicious melody of “The Spirit Flower;” and Lyman Gage forgot that he was playing a part in a strange home with a strange girl, forgot that he hadn’t a cent in the world, and his girl was gone, and sat watching her face as she sang. For Mary had a voice like a thrush in the summer evening, that liquid appeal that always reminds one of a silver spoon dropped into a glass of water; and Mary had a face like the spirit flower itself. As she sang she could not help living, breathing, being the words she spoke.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing,[61] about Mary to remind him of the girl he had lost; and there was something in her sweet, serious demeanor as she sang to call to his better nature; a wholesome, serious sweetness that was in itself a kind of antiseptic against bitterness and sweeping denunciation. Lyman Gage as he listened was lifted out of himself and set in a new world where men and women thought of something besides money and position and social prestige. He seemed to be standing off apart from himself and seeing himself from a new angle, an angle in which he was not the only one that mattered in this world, and in which he got a hint that his plans might be only hindrances to a larger life for himself and every one else. Not that he exactly thought these things in so many words. It was more as if while Mary sang a wind blew freshly from a place where such thoughts were crowding,[62] and made him seem smaller in his own conceit than he had thought he was.

[61]

[62]

“And now sing ‘Laddie,’” pleaded Miss Marilla.

A wave of annoyance swept over Mary Amber’s face. It was plain she did not wish to sing that song. Nevertheless, she sang it, forgetting herself and throwing all the pathos and tenderness into her voice that belonged to the beautiful words. Then she turned from the piano decidedly, and rose. “I must go home at once,” was written in every line of her attitude. Miss Marilla rose nervously, and looked from one of her guests to the other.

“Dick, I wonder if you haven’t learned to sing.”

Her eyes were so 

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