great satiny piano and the crowd, which had pushed forward to the stage, grew quiet and stood listening, waiting, silent and expectant . . . the people from great houses, the people from the suburbs, the young people with worn shoes and shabby clothes. And into the air there rang a shower of spangled notes, gay and sparkling, embracing a rhythm older than any of them. For Lilli Barr—(or was it Ellen Tolliver)—was playing now The Beautiful Blue Danube. It was not the old simple waltz that Hattie had picked out upon the organ in her father's parlor, but an extravagant, brilliant arrangement which beneath the strong, white fingers became fantastical and beautiful beyond description.
Hattie Tolliver wept because she understood. It was as if Ellen—the proud, silent Ellen—had been suddenly stripped of all the old inarticulate pride, as if suddenly she had grown eloquent and all the barriers, like the walls of Jericho, had tumbled down. Hattie Tolliver understood. Her daughter was speaking to her now across all the gulf of years, across the hundred walls which stood between them. This was her reward. She understood and wept at the sudden revelation of the mysterious thread that ran through all life. All this triumph, this beauty, all this splendor had its beginning long ago on the harmonium in the parlor of old Jacob Barr's farm.
When the lights went up and Hattie, drying her eyes and suffering her hand to be patted by Miss Ogilvie, was able to look about her, she saw with a feeling of horror among the figures crowded in a group before the stage a coonskin coat and a sharp old face that was familiar. It was The Everlasting. He had come, after all, alone, aloof, as he had always lived. He stood with his bony old head tilted back a little, peering through his steel rimmed spectacles at the brilliant figure of his granddaughter.
For an instant Hattie thought, triumphantly, "Now he can see that my child is great. That she is famous. He will see," she thought, "what a good mother I have been."
But her sense of triumph was dimmed a little because she
