When later Martigues asked her to sing, she glanced again at Oliver, who nodded and smiled.

“If David will accompany me,” she said then.  David left sandwiches and beer but without enthusiasm.  He crossed over to the piano, and peered up at her with a kind of sombre malice.

“So you will sing now,” he said.  “Will this do?” He played a few notes softly, and she nodded with a little smile.

It was a song about the love of a white-throated sparrow for a birch-tree of the North.  All summer long the bird lived on the topmost branch and sang most beautifully.  The season of southward journey came, but the white throated sparrow would not leave her tree.  She stayed on alone, singing while the leaves turned gold and fell.  She sang more faintly as the land grew white with the first snows and when she could sing no longer for the cold, she nestled down in a bare hollow of the white tree and let the driving flakes of the North cover her.

Oliver stood near the piano.  Myra sang to and for him.  She stood very tall and straight, her hair, loosened from its tight bands, soft around her face.  Her voice thrilled out in the mate-call, grew fainter and sweeter as winter came on, grew poignant under the cold, quivered on the last note.  As David Cannon ended with the fate theme of the tree, a genuine shiver went through the little group.  There was no hesitation this time in the applause.  They swept forward, surrounding her, begging her to sing again.  But it was to Oliver that she turned.

“It pleased you?  I’m glad.”

David Cannon said nothing.  He sat, his shoulders hunched, his fingers on the keys until she had refused to sing again.

“I didn’t think you would,” he said then, and abruptly left his post to go back to beer and sandwiches.  Soon after he slipped out.  Myra went with him to the hall, where they talked for a while in low voices.  When she came back into the room she was smiling serenely.

She and Oliver were alone at last.

“You glorious creature!” he cried.  “I’m so proud of you!  Everyone was crazy about the way you sang.”  She walked slowly toward him.

“Oliver,” she said, “I told David this evening that I wouldn’t go to South America with him.”

“You didn’t!” His voice rose sharp and shocked.

She nodded, beaming almost mischievously.

“But I did, and nothing will make me change my mind.”

“How could you be so impulsive, so foolish!” he cried.

She was looking at him now more soberly.

“Aren’t you glad?”

“Myra, you mustn’t!  I’ll telephone David at once..  I’ll—­you did this for me.  I won’t have it.  You should have asked me——­”

“It’s no use; I’m not going,” she said.

He dropped on the couch and hid his face in his hands.

“You’re giving this up because of me.”

She went to him.

“Oliver, look at me.”