Leaning stiffly forward, her thin neck outstretched, her brows bent toward Rowcliffe, summoning all that she knew of archness to her eyes, she sang.

  “Oh miller, miller, miller, miller, miller, let me go!”

sang the young lady from Morfe.  Alice could see that she sang for Rowcliffe and at Rowcliffe; she sang into his face until he turned it away, and then, utterly unabashed, she sang into his left ear.

The presence and the song of the young lady from Morfe would have been torture to Alice, but that her eyelids and her face were red as if perpetually smitten by the east wind and scarified with weeping.  To Alice, at the piano, it was terrible to be associated with the song of the young lady from Morfe.  She felt that Rowcliffe was looking at her (he wasn’t) and she strove by look and manner to detach herself.  As the young lady flung herself into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe.  She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady’s intentions.  It grew graver and graver.  It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge.  The dirge of the last hope of the young lady from Morfe.

When it ceased there rose from the piano that was its grave the Grande Polonaise of Chopin.  It rose in splendor and defiance; Alice’s defiance of the young lady from Morfe.  It brought down the schoolhouse in a storm of clapping and thumping, of “Bravos” and “Encores.”  Even Rowcliffe said, “Bravo!”

But Alice, still seated at the piano, smiled and signaled.

And Jim Greatorex stood up to sing.

* * * * *

He stood facing the room, but beside her, so that she could sign to him if anything went wrong.

  “’Oh, that we two-oo were May-ing
  Down the stream of the so-oft spring breeze,
  Like children with vi-olets pla-aying.’”

Greatorex’s voice was a voice of awful volume and it ranged somewhere from fairly deep barytone almost to tenor.  It was at moments unmanageable, being untrained, yet he seemed to do as much with it as if it had been bass and barytone and tenor all in one.  It had grown a little thick in the last year, but he brought out of its very thickness a brooding, yearning passion and an intolerable pathos.

The song, overladen with emotion, appealed to him; it expressed as nothing else could have expressed the passions that were within him at that moment.  It swept the whole range of his experiences, there were sheep in it and a churchyard and children (his lady could never be anything more to him than a child).

  “’Oh, that we two-oo were ly-ing
  In our nest in the chu-urch-yard sod,
  With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth’s breast,
  And our souls—­at home—­with God!’”

That finished it.  There was no other end.

And as he sang it, looking nobly if a little heavily over the heads of his audience, he saw Essy Gale hidden away, and trying to hide herself more, beside her mother in the farthest corner of the room.