St. George was vanquished by “converse.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “pray forgive me.  I will say good-by to my friend.”

He turned swiftly and extended his hand to the strange woman behind him.  With the cunning upon which he had counted she gave her own hand, slipping in his the folded paper.  Her eyes, with their haunting watchfulness, held his for a moment as she mutely bent forward when he left her.

The hymn was done and the women were seating themselves, as St. George with beating heart took his way up the aisle.  What the paper contained he could not even conjecture; but there was a paper and it did contain something which he had a pleasant premonition would be invaluable to him.  Yet he was still utterly at loss to account for his own presence there, and this he coolly meant to do.

He was spared the necessity.  On the platform Mrs. Manners had risen to make an announcement; and St. George fancied that she must preside at her tea-urn and try on her bonnets with just that same formal little “announcement” air.

“My friends,” she said, “I have now an unexpected pleasure for you and for us all.  We have with us to-day Mr. St. George, of New York.  Mr. St. George is going to sing for us.”

St. George stood still for a moment, looking into the expectant faces of Mrs. Manners and the other women of the Readers’ Guild, a spark of understanding kindling the mirth in his eyes.  This then accounted both for his admittance to the home and for his welcome by the women upon their errand of mercy.  He had simply been very naturally mistaken for a stranger from New York who had not arrived.  But since he had accomplished something, though he did not know what, inasmuch as the slip of paper lay crushed in his hand unread, he must, he decided, pay for it.  Without ado he stepped to the platform.

“I have explained to Mrs. Manners and to these ladies,” he said gravely, “that I am not the gentleman who was to sing for you.  However, since he is detained, I will do what I can.”

This, mistaken for a merely perfunctory speech of self-depreciation, was received in polite, contradicting silence by the Guild.  St. George, who had a rich, true barytone, quickly ran over his little list of possible songs, none of which he had ever sung to an audience that a canoe would not hold, or to other accompaniment than that of a mandolin.  Partly in memory of those old canoe-evenings St. George broke into a low, crooning plantation melody.  The song, like much of the Southern music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the college men had loved, something—­or so one might have said who took the canoe-music seriously—­of the wildness and fierceness of old tribal loves and plaints and unremembered wooings with a desert background:  a gallop of hoof-beats, a quiver of noon light above saffron sand—­these had been, more or less, in the music when St. George had been wont to lie in a boat and pick at the strings while Amory paddled; and these he must have reechoed before the crowd of curious and sullen and commonplace, lighted by that one wild, strange face.  When he had finished the dark woman sat with bowed head, and St. George himself was more moved by his own effort than was strictly professional.