“Did you bring my songs?” she asked.

From the chair that he had thrown his blouse upon, he produced a flat package neatly wrapped in brown paper.  And as she went over to the window with it, tearing the wrappers away as she walked, he went back to his work at the piano.

“Don’t do that,” she said, as he struck a chord or two.  “I can’t read if you do.”  But almost instantly she added with a laugh, “Oh, all right, go ahead.  I can’t read this anyway.  Why, it’s frightful!” She came swiftly toward the piano and stood the big flat quires of score paper on the rack.  “Show me how this goes,” she commanded, but he pushed back a little with a gesture almost of fright.

“No,” he protested sharply.  “I can’t.  I can’t begin to play that stuff.”

She remained standing beside his shoulder, looking at the score.

“They’re strange words,” she said, and began reading them to herself, half aloud, haltingly.

“’Low hangs the moon.  It rose late,
It is lagging—­O I think it is heavy with love, with love.’”

“Walt Whitman,” he told her.  “They’re all out of a poem called Sea-Drift.”

She went on reading, now audibly, now with a mere silent movement of the lips, half puzzled, half entranced, and catching—­despite her protest that she could not read the music,—­some intimations of its intense strange beauty.

“’ ..._do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?...  Loud I call to you, my love ...  Surely you must know who is here ...  O rising stars!  Perhaps the one I want so much will rise ... with some of you ...  O trembling throat!  Sound clearer through the atmosphere_ ...’”

With a shake of the head, like one trying to stop the weaving of a spell, she turned the pages back to the beginning.

“This means Novelli,” she said.  “I’ll get him.  I’ll get him this morning.  He’s the best accompanist in Chicago.  We’ll go to work on them and when we’ve got them presentable, I’ll let you know and sing them to you.  Where do you live?”

He got up for a paper and pencil and wrote out an address and a telephone number.  She was still staring at that first page of the score when he brought it back to her.

“I’ve never heard any of those songs myself,” he told her.

At that she looked around at him, looked steadily into his face for a moment and then her eyes filled with tears.  She reached out both hands and took him by the shoulders.  “Well, you’re going to hear them this time, my dear,” she said.  As she moved away, she added in a more matter-of-fact tone, “Just as soon as we can work them up, in a few days perhaps.  I’ll let you know.”

CHAPTER III

THE PEACE BASIS