“What?” Dwight used the falsetto.  “Lulu sing? Lulu?”

She stood awkwardly.  She had a piteous recrudescence of her old agony at being spoken to in the presence of others.  But Di had opened the “Album of Old Favourites,” which Cornish had elected to bring, and now she struck the opening chords of “Bonny Eloise.”  Lulu stood still, looking rather piteously at Cornish.  Dwight offered his arm, absurdly crooked.  The Plows and Ina and Di began to sing.  Lulu moved forward, and stood a little away from them, and sang, too.  She was still holding Ninian’s picture.  Dwight did not sing.  He lifted his shoulders and his eyebrows and watched Lulu.

When they had finished, “Lulu the mocking bird!” Dwight cried.  He said “ba-ird.”

“Fine!” cried Cornish.  “Why, Miss Lulu, you have a good voice!”

“Miss Lulu Bett, the mocking ba-ird!” Dwight insisted.

Lulu was excited, and in some accession of faint power.  She turned to him now, quietly, and with a look of appraisal.

“Lulu the dove,” she then surprisingly said, “to put up with you.”

It was her first bit of conscious repartee to her brother-in-law.

Cornish was bending over Di.

“What next do you say?” he asked.

She lifted her eyes, met his own, held them.  “There’s such a lovely, lovely sacred song here,” she suggested, and looked down.

“You like sacred music?”

She turned to him her pure profile, her eyelids fluttering up, and said:  “I love it.”

“That’s it.  So do I. Nothing like a nice sacred piece,” Cornish declared.

Bobby Larkin, at the end of the piano, looked directly into Di’s face.

“Give me ragtime,” he said now, with the effect of bursting out of somewhere.  “Don’t you like ragtime?” he put it to her directly.

Di’s eyes danced into his, they sparkled for him, her smile was a smile for him alone, all their store of common memories was in their look.

“Let’s try ‘My Rock, My Refuge,’” Cornish suggested.  “That’s got up real attractive.”

Di’s profile again, and her pleased voice saying that this was the very one she had been hoping to hear him sing.

They gathered for “My Rock, My Refuge.”

“Oh,” cried Ina, at the conclusion of this number, “I’m having such a perfectly beautiful time.  Isn’t everybody?” everybody’s hostess put it.

“Lulu is,” said Dwight, and added softly to Lulu:  “She don’t have to hear herself sing.”

It was incredible.  He was like a bad boy with a frog.  About that photograph of Ninian he found a dozen ways to torture her, called attention to it, showed it to Cornish, set it on the piano facing them all.  Everybody must have understood—­excepting the Plows.  These two gentle souls sang placidly through the Album of Old Favourites, and at the melodies smiled happily upon each other with an air from another world.  Always it was as if the Plows walked some fair, inter-penetrating plane, from which they looked out as do other things not quite of earth, say, flowers and fire and music.