lected orchard were palely gilded. The clouds above were being rolled back like some billowing curtain in order that the sun might have full play upon the vast stage where the annual drama of creation was commencing. Over the fields there was a faint green halo of growth. In a few weeks the trees would be spilling over with leaves and blossoms; summer would come at one stride, then autumn with its fruits, and winter again with its blizzards and silences and delays—world without end, Amen. Nature was showing off to-day, Nature the virtuoso. The genius of God was putting to the blush anything man might hope to accomplish.
When Paul passed through the gate on his breathless return for dinner, he stopped short in amazement. This time there was no mistaking his ears, and he went around to the orchard side of the house and listened under the playroom window.
Great chords were tumbling forth with a profusion beyond anything he had ever heard. From the idiom of the music he recognized it as Beethoven, but it was as though the instrument—his child piano—had grown up and burst into song with the deep-throated voice of maturity. The music screamed, roared, rumbled, pleaded, wailed, grieved, sighed, and suddenly subsided to a singing plaintiveness. His heart was in his mouth as he listened, and tears stung his eyelids. To think of all that eloquence having been repressed for years and years and years, buried like the false steward's talent, like the precious books packed into crates, like the untold treasures locked in trunks and drawers!
The music broke off, recommenced, broke off again at the same point, recommenced, impatiently. Aunt Verona, he reflected, must be so badly out of practice after all the silent years that she found those mordents difficult. He could have played them—easily! Ah, but he couldn't have given the piano a soul as she had done.
