“Of course I didn’t!  Hasn’t every prima donna a larynx to hid behind?” She lifted off her fur cap, spilling curls.

“Well, I—­I’ll be hanged!” said Lieutenant Kantor, his eyes lakes of her reflected loveliness.

She let her hand linger in his.

“Leon—­you—­really going—­how—­terrible—­how—­how—­wonderful!”

“How wonderful—­your coming!”

“I—­you think it was not nice of me—­to come?”

“I think it was the nicest thing that ever happened in the world.”

“All the way here in the train, I kept saying—­crazy—­crazy—­running to tell Leon—­Lieutenant—­Kantor good-bye—­when you haven’t even seen him three times in three years—­”

“But each—­each of those three times we—­we’ve remembered, Gina.”

“But that’s how I feel toward all the boys, Leon—­our fighting boys—­just like flying to them to kiss them each one good-bye.”

“Come over, Gina.  You’ll be a treat to our mother.  I—­well, I’m hanged—­all the way from Philadelphia!”

There was even a sparkle to talk then, and a let-up of pressure.  After a while, Sarah Kantor looked up at her son, tremulous but smiling.

“Well, son, you going to play—­for your old mother before—­you go?  It’ll be many a month—­spring—­maybe longer before I hear my boy again except on the discaphone.”

He shot a quick glance to his sister.

“Why, I—­I don’t know.  I—­I’d love it, ma if—­if you think, Esther, I’d better.”

“You don’t need to be afraid of me, darlink.  There’s nothing can give me strength to bear—­what’s before me like—­like my boy’s music.  That’s my life, his music.”

“Why, yes; if mamma is sure she feels that way, play for us, Leon.”

He was already at the instrument, where it lay swathed, atop the grand piano.

“What’ll it be, folks?”

“Something to make ma laugh, Leon—­something light, something funny.”

“’Humoresque’?” he said, with a quick glance for Miss Berg.

“‘Humoresque,’” she said, smiling back at him.

He capered through, cutting and playful of bow, the melody of Dvorak’s, which is as ironic as a grinning mask.

Finished, he smiled at his parent, her face still untearful.

“How’s that?”

“It’s like life, son, that piece.  Laughing and making fun of—­the way just as we think we got—­we ain’t got.”

“Play that new piece, Leon, the one you set to music.  You know.  The words by that young boy in the war who wrote such grand poetry before he was killed.  The one that always makes poor Mannie laugh.  Play it for him, Leon.”

Her plump little unlined face innocent of fault, Mrs. Isadore Kantor ventured her request, her smile tired with tears.”

“No, no—­Rosa—­not now—­ma wouldn’t want that.”

“I do, son; I do!  Even Mannie should have his share of good-bye.”

To Gina Berg:  “They want me to play that little setting of mine of Allan Seeger’s poem, ‘I have a rendezvous.’”