“Well?” said Meg again.

“And Father is as mad as he can be, and is having to keep them all amused himself.  He’s sung ‘My sweetheart when a boy’ and ‘Mona,’ and he’s told them all about his horses, and now I s’pose he doesn’t know what to do.”

“Well, I can’t help it,” Meg said wearily, and as if the subject had no interest for her.

“But you’ll just have to!” Nell cried sharply, “I’ve done my best:  he sent out and said we were to go in, and you weren’t anywhere, so there was only Baby and me.”

“And what did you do?” Meg asked, curious in spite of herself.

“Oh, Baby talked to Miss Gormeston, and they asked me to play,” she returned, “so I played the ‘Keel Row.’  Only I forgot till I had finished that it was in two sharps,” she added sadly.  “And then Baby told Mrs. Gormeston all about Judy leaving the General at the Barracks, and being sent to boarding school for it, and about the green frog Bunty gave her, and, then Father said we’d better go to bed, and asked why ever you didn’t come in.”

“I’ll go, I’ll go,” Meg said hastily, “he’ll be fearfully cross to-morrow about it.  Oh! and, Nell, go and tell Martha to send in the wine and biscuits and things in half an hour.”

She flung off her cloud, smoothed her ruffled hair, and peeped in the hall-stand glass to see if the night wind had taken away the traces of her recent tears.  Then she went into the drawing-roam, where her father was looking quite heated and unhappy over his efforts to entertain four guests who were of the class popularly known as “heavy in hand:” 

“Play something, Meg,” he said presently, when greetings were finished, and a silence seemed settling down over them all again; “or sing something that will be better—­haven’t you anything you can sing?”

Now Meg on ordinary occasions had a pleasant, fresh little voice of her own, that could be listened to with a certain amount of pleasure, but this evening she was tired and excited and unhappy.  She sang “Within a mile of Edinboro’ town,” and was exceedingly flat all through.

She knew her father was sitting on edge all the time, and that her mistakes were grating on him, and at the end of the song, rather than turn round immediately and face them all, she began to play Kowalski’s March Hongroise.  But the keys seemed to be rising up and hitting her hands, and the piano was growing unsteady, and rocking to and fro in an alarming manner; she made a horrible jangle as she clutched at the music-holder for safety, and the next minute swayed from the stool and fell in a dead, faint right into Dr. Gormeston’s arms, providentially extended just in time.