Tom Osby did not quite follow all her thoughts, but he went on.

“It was ‘Annie Laurie,’” said he.  “I knew you sung it.  Ma’am, I played her all the way from Vegas down.”

“But why did you come?” She was cruel; but a woman must have her toll.  The renewed answer cost courage of Tom Osby.

“Ma’am,” said he, “I won’t lie to you.  I just come to see you, or to hear you, I can’t rightly tell which.  It must have been both.”  Now he arose and flung out a hand, rudely but eloquently.  “Ma’am,” he went on, “I knowed you come from Georgy onct, the same as me.  And I knowed that a Georgy girl, someway, somewhere, somehow, would have a soft spot in her heart.  I come to hear you sing.  There’s things that us fellers want, sometimes.”

The woman before him drew a deep, long breath.

“I reckon you’ll have to sing again,” the man went on.  “You’ll have to sing that there song, ‘Annie Laurie,’ like I heard it more than onct, before I went away from home.”

The soft Georgia speech came back to his tongue, and she followed it herself, unconsciously.

“My friend,” said she, “you’re right.  I reckon I’ll have to sing.”

“When?” said Tom Osby.

“Now,” said Alice Strowbridge.  She rose and stepped toward the piano open near the fire.

The color was full on her cheek now; the jewels glanced now above a deep bosom laboring in no counterfeit emotion.  A splendid creature, bedecked, bejewelled, sex all over, magnificent, terrible, none the less, although the eyes of Alice Strowbridge shone sombrely, her hands twined together in embarrassment, as they did the first time she sang in public as a child.  The very shoulders under the heavy laces caught a plaintive droop, learned in no role of Marguerite in any land.  The red rose at her hair—­the rose got from some mysterious source—­half trembled.  Fear, a great fear—­the first stage fright known in years—­swept over Alice Strowbridge, late artist, and now woman.  There sat upon her soul a sense of unpreparedness for this new Public, this lone man from a mysterious land called Heart’s Desire—­a place where men, actual men, earnest men, were living, vaguely yearning for that which was not theirs.  She felt them gazing into her soul, asking how she had guarded the talents, how she had prized the jewels given her, what she had done for the heart of humanity.  Halfway across the floor she stopped, her hand at her throat.

“I know this here is right funny,” said Tom Osby, misunderstanding, “for me to do this-a-way.  It’s right embarrassin’ for a lady like you to try to oblige a feller like me.  But, ma’am, all I can say is, all the boys’ll be mightily obliged to you.”

She flashed upon him a smile which had tears in it.  Tom Osby grew more confident, more bold.

“Ma’am,” said he, clearing his throat, “I want you to forgive me; but I reckon how, when you great people sing different things, you-all sort of dress up, different like, at different times, accordin’ to the things you are singin’ right then.  Ain’t that so?”