“Slush, slush, luv-a-ly slush,” came in muffled tones from the floor.

“And he wears his clothes so well—­so differently!  You feel at once that he’s not a person, but a personage.”

Hedrick sat up, his eyes closed, his features contorted as with agony, and chanted, impromptu: 

    “Slush, slush, luv-a-ly, slush! 
    Le’ss all go a-swimmin’ in a dollar’s worth o’ mush. 
    Slush in the morning, slush at night,
    If I don’t get my slush I’m bound to get tight!”

“Hedrick!” said his mother.

“Altogether I should say that Mr. Valentine Corliss looks as if he lived up to his name,” Cora went on tranquilly.  “Valentine Corliss of Corliss Street—­I think I rather like the sound of that name.”  She let her beautiful voice linger upon it, caressingly.  “Valentine Corliss.”

Hedrick opened his eyes, allowed his countenance to resume its ordinary proportions, and spoke another name slowly and with honeyed thoughtfulness: 

“Ray Vilas.”

This was the shot that told.  Cora sprang down from the table with an exclamation.

Hedrick, subduing elation, added gently, in a mournful whisper: 

“Poor old Dick Lindley!”

His efforts to sting his sister were completely successful at last:  Cora was visibly agitated, and appealed hotly to her mother.  “Am I to bear this kind of thing all my life?  Aren’t you ever going to punish his insolence?”

“Hedrick, Hedrick!” said Mrs. Madison sadly.

Cora turned to the girl by the window with a pathetic gesture.  “Laura——­” she said, and hesitated.

Laura Madison looked up into her sister’s troubled eyes.

“I feel so morbid,” said Cora, flushing a little and glancing away.  “I wish——­” She stopped.

The silent Laura set aside her work, rose and went out of the room.  Her cheeks, too, had reddened faintly, a circumstance sharply noted by the terrible boy.  He sat where he was, asprawl, propped by his arms behind him, watching with acute concentration the injured departure of Cora, following her sister.  At the door, Cora, without pausing, threw him a look over her shoulder:  a full-eyed shot of frankest hatred.

A few moments later, magnificent chords sounded through the house.  The piano was old, but tuned to the middle of the note, and the keys were swept by a master hand.  The wires were not hammered; they were touched knowingly as by the player’s own fingers, and so they sang—­and from out among the chords there stole an errant melody.  This was not “piano-playing” and not a pianist’s triumphant nimbleness—­it was music.  Art is the language of a heart that knows how to speak, and a heart that knew how was speaking here.  What it told was something immeasurably wistful, something that might have welled up in the breast of a young girl standing at twilight in an April orchard.  It was the inexpressible made into sound, an improvisation by a master player.