plush and brocade furniture, full-length walnut mirror, battered piano
on which reposes a sheet of music given away with the Sunday
supplement of a city paper.

A man was seated at the piano, playing. He was not playing the Sunday
supplement sheet music. His brown hat was pushed back on his head and
there was a fat cigar in his pursy mouth, and as he played he squinted
up through the smoke. He was playing Mendelssohn's Spring Song. Not as
you have heard it played by sweet young things; not as you have heard
it rendered by the Apollo String Quartette. Under his fingers it was a
fragrant, trembling, laughing, sobbing, exquisite thing. He was
playing it in a way to make you stare straight ahead and swallow hard.

Emma McChesney leaned her head against the door. The man at the piano
did not turn. So she tip-toed in, found a chair in a corner, and
noiselessly slipped into it. She sat very still, listening, and the
past-that-might-have-been, and the future-that-was-to-be, stretched
behind and before her, as is strangely often the case when we are
listening to music. She stared ahead with eyes that were very wide
open and bright. Something in the attitude of the man sitting hunched
there over the piano keys, and something in the beauty and pathos of
the music brought a hot haze of tears to her eyes. She leaned her head
against the back of the chair, and shut her eyes and wept quietly and
heart-brokenly. The tears slid down her cheeks, and dropped on her
smart tailored waist and her Irish lace jabot, and she didn't care a
bit.

The last lovely note died away. The fat man's hands dropped limply to
his sides. Emma McChesney stared at them, fascinated. They were quite
marvelous hands; not at all the sort of hands one would expect to see