“Oh, Arnold, darling, how could you, how could you frighten me so?”

The child began to cry, because it was reproved, because its pleasure was stopped, and because Cousin Laura, pale and white, held to the railing of the piazza for support.  But the mamma came out, Laura was lifted in, the boy was scolded, the windows were shut, and there was the end.

Arnold sat by the window, thinking.  The thrilling tones of the voice still rang in his ear, as though they were calling upon him, “Arnold, come, come back!”

“If any voice would speak to me in that tone!” he thought; “if such a voice would call upon my name with all that heart in its depths!”

And he compared it with the tone in which Caroline had appealed to him the day before.  Sometimes her voice assumed the same earnestness, and he felt as if she were showing him in the words all her own heart, betraying love, warmth, ardor.  Sometimes, in comparison with that cry, her tones seemed cold and metallic, a selfish appeal of danger, not a cry of love.  He found himself examining her more nearly than he had ever done before.

“Was she more than outwardly beautiful?  Was there any warmth beneath that cold manner?  Could she warm as well as shine?”

He remembered that she had often complained to him of her longing for sympathy; she had spoken to him of the coldness of the world, of the heartlessness of society.  She had envied him his genius,—­the musical talent that made him independent of the world, of the love of men and women.  He could never appreciate what it was to be alone in the world, to find one’s higher feelings misunderstood, to be obliged to pass from one gayety to another, to be dissatisfied with the superficiality of life, and yet to find no relief;—­all this she had said to him.

But why was it so with her?  She had a very substantial father and mother, who seemed to devote themselves to her wishes,—­some younger brothers,—­he had seen them pushed from the drawing-room the day of the matinee,—­a sister near her age, not yet out.  Caroline had apologized for her sister’s crying while listening to his music.  “She was unsophisticated still, and had not forgotten her boarding-school nonsense.”  Then, if Caroline did not enjoy city-life, there was a house in the country to which she might have gone early in the spring.  She had, too, her friend Marie.  She imparted to him some of Marie’s confidences, her sad history; Marie must be enough of a friend to be trusted in return.  In short, Caroline’s manner had always been so conventional and unimpulsive, that these complaints of life had seemed to him a part of her society-tone, aa easily taken on and off as her bonnet or her paletot.  They suited the enthusiasm that was necessary with music, and would be forgotten in her talk with Mr. Gresham the banker.