“We have many costumes,” said she, simply.  “We play many parts.  Sometimes we hardly know we are ourselves.”

“And when you sung that ‘Annie Laurie’ song, did you have any coschume to go along with that?”

“You mean—­”

“Well, now, ma’am, when us fellers was talkin’ it over, it always seemed to us, somehow, like the Annie Laurie coschume was right white.”  He blushed and hastened to apologize.  “Not sayin’ anything against that dress you’ve got on,” he said.  “I never saw one as fine as that in all my life.  I never saw any woman, never in all my life, like you.  I—­I—­ma’am”—­he flushed, but went on with a Titanic simplicity—­“I worship you, right where you stand, in that there dress; but—­could you—­”

“You are an artist yourself!” cried she.  “Yes!  Wait!”

In an instant she was gone from the room, leaving Tom Osby staring at the flickering fire, now brighter in the advancing shades of evening.  In perhaps half an hour Alice Strowbridge reappeared.  The rich black laces, and the ripe red rose, and the blazing jewels, all were gone.  She was clad in simple white—­and yes! a blue sash was there.  The piled masses of her hair were replaced by two long, glossy braids.  By the grace of the immortal gods all misdeeds were lifted from her that night.  For once in many years she was sincere.  Now she was a girl again, and back at the old home.  Those were the southern mountains half hidden in the twilight; and yonder was the moon of the old days, swinging up again.  There was the gallery at the window of the old Georgia home, and the gate, and the stairs, and the hedgerow, and the trailing vines, and the voices of little birds; and Youth—­Youth, the unspeakable glory of Youth—­it all was hers once more!  The souls of a thousand Georgia mocking-birds—­the soul of that heritage which came to her out of her environment—­lay in her throat that hour.

And so, not to an audience, but to an auditor—­nay, perhaps, after all, to the audience of Heart’s Desire, an audience of unsated souls—­she sang, although of visible audience there was but one man, who sat crumpled up, shaken, undone.

She could not, being a woman, oblige any man by direct compliance; she could not deprive herself of her own little triumph.  Or perhaps, deliberately, she sought to give this solitary listener that which it would have cost thousands of dollars for a wider public to hear.  She sang first the leading arias of her more prominent operatic roles.  She sang the Page’s song, which had been hers in her first appearance on a critical stage. “Nobil signors,” she sang, her voice lingering.  And then presently there fell from her lips the sparkling measures of Coquette, indescribably light, indescribably brilliant in her rendition.  Melody after melody, score after score, product of the greatest composers of the world, she gave to a listener who never definitely