“But what could I do, more than what I had done?  Nettie was looking at the photograph when I shut the door on ’em.  ’The soul behind the wood and wire,’ she murmurs.  I looked closer then and what do you reckon it was?  Just as true as I set here, it was Wilbur, leaning forward all negligent and patronizing on a twelve-hundred-dollar grand piano, his hair well forward and his eyes masterful, like that there noble instrument was his bond slave.  But wait!  And underneath he’d writ a bar of music with notes running up and down, and signed his name to it—­not plain, mind you, though he can write a good business hand if he wants to, but all scrawly like some one important, so you couldn’t tell if it was meant for Dutch or English.  Could you beat that for nerve—­in a day, in a million years?

“‘What’s Wilbur writing that kind of music for?’ I asks in a cold voice.  ’He don’t know that kind.  What he had ought to of written is a bunch of them hollow slats and squares like they punch in the only kind of music he plays,’ I says.

“‘Hush!’ says Nettie.  ’It’s that last divine phrase, “To kiss the cross!"’

“I choked up myself then.  And I went to bed and thought.  And this is what I thought:  When you think you got the winning hand, keep on raising.  To call is to admit you got no faith in your judgment.  Better lay down than call.  So I resolve not to say another word to the girl about Chester, but simply to press the song in on her.  Already it had made her act like a human person.  Of course I didn’t worry none about Wilbur.  The wisdom of the ages couldn’t have done that.  But I seen I had got to have a real first-class human voice in that song, like the one I had heard in New York City.  They’ll just have to clench, I think, when they hear a good A-number-one voice in it.

“Next day I look in on Wilbur and say, ’What about this concert and musical entertainment the North Side set is talking about giving for the starving Belgians?’

“‘The plans are maturing,’ he says, ’but I’m getting up a Brahms concerto that I have promised to play—­you know how terrifically difficult Brahms is—­so the date hasn’t been set yet.’

“‘Well, set it and let’s get to work,’ I says.  ’There’ll be you, and the North Side Ladies’ String Quartet, and Ed Bughalter with a bass solo, and Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale with the “Jewel Song” from Faust, and I been thinking,’ I says, ’that we had ought to get a good professional lady concert singer down from Spokane.’

“‘I’m afraid the expenses would go over our receipts,’ says Wilbur, and I can see him figuring that this concert will cost the Belgians money instead of helping ’em; so right off I says, ’If you can get a good-looking, sad-faced contralto, with a low-cut black dress, that can sing “The Rosary” like it had ought to be sung, why, you can touch me for that part of the evening’s entertainment.’

“Wilbur says I’m too good, not suspicioning I’m just being wily, so he says he’ll write up and fix it.  And a couple days later he says the lady professional is engaged, and it’ll cost me fifty, and he shows me her picture and the dress is all right, and she had a sad, powerful face, and the date is set and everything.