Helen was at the top of her being just then, and in perfect command of things; she had no idea of letting herself be dragged down into the commonplace again.  “I think it’s about time I was fascinating him,” she said to herself, and she started in, full of merriment and life.  Taking her last remark as a cue, she told him funny stories about the eccentricities of the sonata’s great composer, how he would storm and rage up and down his room like a madman, and how he hired a boy to pump water over his head by the hour, in case of emergency.

Mr. Harrison remarked that it was funny how all musicians were such queer chaps, but even that did not discourage Helen.  She rattled on, quite as supremely captivating as she had been at the dinner table, and as she saw that her companion was yielding to her spell, the color mounted to her cheeks and her blood flowed faster yet.

It is of the nature of such flame to feed itself, and Helen grew the more exulting as she perceived her success,—­and consequently all the more irresistible.  The eyes of the man were soon riveted upon the gorgeous vision of loveliness before him, and the contagion of the girl’s animation showed itself even in him, for he brightened a little, and was clever enough to startle himself.  It was a new delight and stimulus to Helen to perceive it, and she was soon swept away in much the same kind of nervous delight as her phantasy with the thunderstorm.  The sofa upon which the two were seated had been somewhat apart from the rest, and so they had nothing to disturb them.  A short half hour fled by, during which Helen’s daring animation ruled everything, and at the end of which Mr. Harrison was quite oblivious to everything about him.

There were others, however, who were watching the affair; the keen-eyed Aunt Polly was comprehending all with joy, but she was as ever calculating and prudent, and she knew that Helen’s monopoly of Mr. Harrison would soon become unpleasantly conspicuous, especially as she had so far introduced him to no one else.  She felt that little would he lost by breaking the spell, for what the girl was doing then she might do any time she chose; and so after waiting a while longer she made her way unobtrusively over to them and joined their conversation.

Helen of course understood her aunt’s meaning, and acquiesced; she kept on laughing and talking for a minute or two more, and then at a lull in the conversation she exclaimed:  “But I’ve been keeping Mr. Harrison here talking to me, and nobody else has seen anything of him.”  And so Mr. Harrison, inwardly anathematizing the rest of the company, was compelled to go through a long series of handshakings, and finally to be drawn into a group of young persons whose conversation seemed to him the most inane he had ever heard in his life.

In the meantime someone else was giving a piano selection, one which Helen had never heard, but which sounded to every one like a finger exercise after her own meteoric flight; the girl sat half listening to it and half waiting for her aunt to return, which Mrs. Roberts finally did, beaming with gratitude.