The instruments had been put under the piano.  Patricia Marshall handed them forth, and sounded the notes for them to be tuned.  Clarice Nixon was placing chairs and music-stands.  Garnet was tolerably composed, but Winona was suffering from a bad attack of that most unpleasant malady “stage fright.”  She would have given worlds for a trapdoor in the platform to open, and allow her to subside out of sight.  No such convenient arrangement, however, had been provided for the use of bashful performers, the planks were solid, and guaranteed not to give way under any circumstances.  There was nothing for it but to take her seat in full view of the audience.  There were slightly over two hundred girls in the room, but to Winona’s fevered imagination there appeared to be thousands.  She wondered how she could ever have had the folly to place herself in such a public situation.  Garnet was sounding a few notes and looking at her to begin.  For one dreadful moment the room whirled.  Perhaps Margaret saw and understood; she laid her hand on Winona’s shaking arm, and whispered encouragingly: 

“Go on!  Don’t mind the audience.  Just remember that you’re playing for the form trophy!”

A sudden revulsion of feeling swept over Winona.  All the school patriotism aroused within her by Margaret’s speech surged up to meet the crisis.  She was no longer an isolated atom, a girl fresh from home, and on trial before the critical eyes of her new form, but a unit in the great life of the school, bound to play her part for the good of the whole, and specially pledged not to fail Garnet in this emergency.  Self faded in the larger vision.  The color flooded back into her face.  She made a desperate effort, and struck the opening chords.

As her friend had reminded her, a duet was quite a different matter from a solo.  Directly the mandoline part began, her confidence returned.  She tried to think that she was only playing an accompaniment for Garnet.  The piece was not difficult, it was in D, quite the easiest key for the guitar, with very few accidentals or high positions.  She took courage, and struck her strings crisply, so that the tone rang out well.  Her instrument was a good one, very true and mellow, and her mother had taught her the liquid Spanish touch which showed it to its best advantage.  Garnet also was doing her best.  Her plectrum vibrated evenly and rapidly, and the metallic twang, her gravest fault, was not nearly so evident as usual.  The audience, unfamiliar with these particular instruments, was not hypercritical, and so long as the players kept well together, and sounded no discords, their skill was judged to be excellent.  The Barcarolle had an attractive swing about it, and a romantic suggestion of gondolas and lapping water and moonlight serenades.  As the last notes of the air on the mandoline died away, Winona swept her thumb over the strings of her guitar in a tremendous final chord.  It had quite a magnificent and professional effect.  There was no mistake about the applause; it was simply clamorous.