the piano never ceased playing.  She played mostly by request.  A prospective purchaser would mumble something in the ear of one of the clerks.  The fat man with the megaphone would bawl out, “‘Hicky Bloo!’ Miss Ryan.”  And Miss Ryan would oblige.  She made a hideous rattle and crash and clatter of sound compared to which an Indian tom-tom would have seemed as dulcet as the strumming of a lute in a lady’s boudoir.

Terry joined the crowds about the counter.  The girl at the piano was not looking at the keys.  Her head was screwed around over her left shoulder and as she played she was holding forth animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour.  Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness.  She paid no heed.  There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenceless keys.  Her conversation with the frowzy little girl went on.

“Wha’d he say?” (Over her shoulder).

“Oh, he laffed.”

“Well, didja go?”

“Me!  Well, whutya think I yam, anyway?”

“I woulda took a chanst.”

The fat man rebelled.

“Look here!  Get busy!  What are you paid for?  Talkin’ or playin’?  Huh?”

The person at the piano, openly reproved thus before her friend, lifted her uninspired hands from the keys and spake.  When she had finished she rose.

“But you can’t leave now,” the megaphone man argued.  “Right in the rush hour.”

“I’m gone,” said the girl.  The fat man looked about, helplessly.  He gazed at the abandoned piano, as though it must go on of its own accord.  Then at the crowd.  “Where’s Miss Schwimmer?” he demanded of a clerk.

“Out to lunch.”

Terry pushed her way to the edge of the counter and leaned over.  “I can play for you,” she said.

The man looked at her.  “Sight?”

“Yes.”

“Come on.”

Terry went around to the other side of the counter, took off her hat and coat, rubbed her hands together briskly, sat down and began to play.  The crowd edged closer.

It is a curious study, this noonday crowd that gathers to sate its music-hunger on the scraps vouchsafed it by Bernie Gottschalk’s Music House.  Loose-lipped, slope-shouldered young men with bad complexions and slender hands.  Girls whose clothes are an unconscious satire on present-day fashions.  On their faces, as they listen to the music, is a look of peace and dreaming.  They stand about, smiling a wistful half smile.  It is much the same expression that steals over the face of a smoker who has lighted his after-dinner cigar, or of a drug victim who is being lulled by his opiate.  The music seems to satisfy a something within them.  Faces dull, eyes lustreless, they listen in a sort of trance.

Terry played on.  She played as Terry Sheehan used to play.  She played as no music hack at Bernie Gottschalk’s had ever played before.  The crowd swayed a little to the sound of it.  Some kept time with little jerks of the shoulder—­the little hitching movement of the rag-time dancer whose blood is filled with the fever of syncopation.  Even the crowd flowing down State Street must have caught the rhythm of it, for the room soon filled.