“Well!” Lulu thought.  “He can’t be so very much in love.”  And again she thought:  “He doesn’t know anything about the letter.  He thinks Ninian got tired of me.”  Deep in her heart there abode her certainty that this was not so.

By some etiquette of consent, Mrs. Bett cleared the table and Lulu and Cornish went into the parlour.  There lay the letter on the drop-leaf side-table, among the shells.  Lulu had carried it there, where she need not see it at her work.  The letter looked no more than the advertisement of dental office furniture beneath it.  Monona stood indifferently fingering both.

“Monona,” Lulu said sharply, “leave them be!”

Cornish was displaying his music.  “Got up quite attractive,” he said—­it was his formula of praise for his music.

“But we can’t try it over,” Lulu said, “if Di doesn’t come.”

“Well, say,” said Cornish shyly, “you know I left that Album of Old Favourites here.  Some of them we know by heart.”

Lulu looked.  “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “there’s some of these I can play with one hand—­by ear.  Maybe—­”

“Why sure!” said Cornish.

Lulu sat at the piano.  She had on the wool chally, long sacred to the nights when she must combine her servant’s estate with the quality of being Ina’s sister.  She wore her coral beads and her cameo cross.  In her absence she had caught the trick of dressing her hair so that it looked even more abundant—­but she had not dared to try it so until to-night, when Dwight was gone.  Her long wrist was curved high, her thin hand pressed and fingered awkwardly, and at her mistakes her head dipped and strove to make all right.  Her foot continuously touched the loud pedal—­the blurred sound seemed to accomplish more.  So she played “How Can I Leave Thee,” and they managed to sing it.  So she played “Long, Long Ago,” and “Little Nell of Narragansett Bay.”  Beyond open doors, Mrs. Bett listened, sang, it may be, with them; for when the singers ceased, her voice might be heard still humming a loud closing bar.

“Well!” Cornish cried to Lulu; and then, in the formal village phrase:  “You’re quite a musician.”

“Oh, no!” Lulu disclaimed it.  She looked up, flushed, smiling.  “I’ve never done this in front of anybody,” she owned.  “I don’t know what Dwight and Ina’d say....”  She drooped.

They rested, and, miraculously, the air of the place had stirred and quickened, as if the crippled, halting melody had some power of its own, and poured this forth, even thus trampled.

“I guess you could do ’most anything you set your hand to,” said Cornish.

“Oh, no,” Lulu said again.

“Sing and play and cook—­”

“But I can’t earn anything.  I’d like to earn something.”  But this she had not meant to say.  She stopped, rather frightened.

“You would!  Why, you have it fine here, I thought.”

“Oh, fine, yes.  Dwight gives me what I have.  And I do their work.”