Then I stopped and turned around on the piano-stool.  And there was the coffin plate, and the wax cross, and the hair wreath; and the room was just as still as death.  And I knew I wasn’t in Boston.  I was there in Andersonville, And there wasn’t any Baby Lester there, nor any mother waiting for me in the next room.  And all the fluffy white dresses and silk stockings in the world wouldn’t make me Marie.  I was really just Mary, and I had got to have three whole months more of it.

And then is when I began to cry.  And I cried just as hard as I’d been singing a minute before.  I was on the floor with my head in my arms on the piano-stool when Father’s voice came to me from the doorway.

“Mary, Mary, what in the world does this mean?”

I jumped up and stood “at attention,” the way you have to, of course, when fathers speak to you.  I couldn’t help showing I had been crying—­he had seen it.  But I tried very hard to stop now.  My first thought, after my startled realization that he was there, was to wonder how long he had been there—­how much of all that awful singing and banging he had heard.

“Yes, sir.”  I tried not to have my voice shake as I said it; but I couldn’t quite help that.

“What is the meaning of this, Mary?  Why are you crying?”

I shook my head.  I didn’t want to tell him, of course; so I just stammered out something about being sorry I had disturbed him.  Then I edged toward the door to show him that if he would step one side I would go away at once and not bother him any longer.

But he didn’t step one side.  He asked more questions, one right after another.

“Are you sick, Mary?”

I shook my head.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

I shook my head again.

“It isn’t—­your mother—­you haven’t had bad news from her?”

And then I blurted it out without thinking—­without thinking at all what I was saying:  “No, no—­but I wish I had, I wish I had; ’cause then I could go to her, and go away from here!” The minute I’d said it I knew what I’d said, and how awful it sounded; and I clapped my fingers to my lips.  But ’twas too late.  It’s always too late, when you’ve once said it.  So I just waited for him to thunder out his anger; for, of course, I thought he would thunder in rage and righteous indignation.

But he didn’t.  Instead, very quietly and gently he said: 

“Are you so unhappy, then, Mary—­here?”

And I looked at him, and his eyes and his mouth and his whole face weren’t angry at all.  They were just sorry, actually sorry.  And somehow, before I knew it, I was crying again, and Father, with his arm around me—­with his arm around me! think of that!—­was leading me to the sofa.

And I cried and cried there, with my head on the arm of the sofa, till I’d made a big tear spot on the linen cover; and I wondered if it would dry up before Aunt Jane saw it, or if it would change color or leak through to the red plush underneath, or some other dreadful thing.  And then, some way, I found myself telling it all over to Father—­about Mary and Marie, I mean, just as if he was Mother, or some one I loved—­I mean, some one I loved and wasn’t afraid of; for of course I love Father.  Of course I do!