“Then don’t be so horrid,” returns the pensive girl, taking a seat before him upon the rustic settee, and abstractedly arranging her dress so that only two-thirds of a gaiter-boot can be seen.

Munching cloves, the aroma of which ladens the air all around him, Mr. Bumstead contemplates her with a calmness which would be enthralling, but for the nervous twisting of his features under the torments of a singularly adhesive fly.

“I have come, dear,” he observes, slowly, “to know how soon you will be ready for me to give you your next music-lesson?”

“I prefer that you would not call me your ‘dear,’” was the chilling answer.

The organist thinks for a moment, and then nods his head intelligently.  “You are right,” he says, gravely, “—­there might be somebody listening who could not enter into our real feelings.  And now, how about those music-lessons?”

“I don’t want any more, thank you,” says Flora, coldly.  “While we are all in mourning for our poor, dear absurd Eddy, it seems like a perfectly ridiculous mockery to be practicing the scales.”

Fanning himself with his straw hat, Mr. Bumstead shakes his bushy head several times.  “You do not discriminate sufficiently,” he replies.  “There are kinds of music which, when performed rapidly upon the violin, fife, or kettle-drum, certainly fill the mind with sentiments unfavorable to the deeper anguish of human sorrow.  Of such, however, is not the kind made by young girls, which is at all times a help to the intensity of judicious grief.  Let me assure you, with the candor of an idolized friend, that some of the saddest hours of my life have been spent in teaching you to try to sing a humorous aria from Donizetti; and the moments in which I have most sincerely regretted ever having been born were those in which you have played, in my hearing, the Drinking-song from La Traviata.  Believe me, then, my devoted pupil, there can be nothing at all inconsistent with a prevalence of profound melancholy in your continued piano-playing; whereas, on the contrary, your sudden and permanent cessation might at least surprise your friends and the neighborhood into a light-heartedness temporarily oblivious of the memory of that dear, missing boy, to whom you could not, I hear, give the love already bestowed upon me.”

“I loved him ridiculously, absurdly, with my whole heart,” cries Flora, not altogether liking what she has heard.  “I’m real sorry, too, that they think somebody has killed him.”

Mr, Bumstead folds his brown linen arms as he towers before her, and the dark circles around his eyes appear to shrink with the intensify of his gaze.