now. In repose, they have a dimmed and wearied look. In action,
they are wild and restless, like eyes suddenly wakened from
startling dreams. Robed in white--her soft brown hair hanging
loosely over her shoulders--there is something weird and
ghost-like in the girl, as she moves nearer and nearer to the
window in the full light of the moon--pleading for music that
shall be worthy of the mystery and the beauty of the night.

"Will you come in here if I play to you?" Mrs. Crayford asks. "It
is a risk, my love, to be out so long in the night air."

"No! no! I like it. Play--while I am out here looking at the sea.
It quiets me; it comforts me; it does me good."

She glides back, ghost-like, over the lawn. Mrs. Crayford rises,
and puts down the volume that she has been reading. It is a
record of explorations in the Arctic seas. The time has gone by
when the two lonely women could take an interest in subjects not
connected with their own anxieties. Now, when hope is fast
failing them--now, when their last news of the _Wanderer_ and the
_Sea-mew_ is news that is more than two years old--they can read
of nothing, they can think of nothing, but dangers and
discoveries, losses and rescues in the terrible Polar seas.

Unwillingly, Mrs. Crayford puts her book aside, and opens the
piano--Mozart's "Air in A, with Variations," lies open on the
instrument. One after another she plays the lovely melodies, so
simply, so purely beautiful, of that unpretending and unrivaled
work. At the close of the ninth Variation (Clara's favorite), she
pauses, and turns toward the garden.