"Let's make a circle round the fire and sing the old year out," suggested Rose gaily. "Myrna, get the banjo and the guitar. Shall I play on the piano, Papa Claude, or will you?"
Mr. Martel, expressing the noble sentiment that age should always be an accompaniment to youth, took his place at the piano and, with a pose worthy of Rubinstein, struck a few preliminary chords, while the group about the fire noisily settled itself for the evening.
"You can put your head against my knees, if you like," Rose said to Quin, who was sprawling on the floor at her feet. "There, is that comfy?"
"I'll say it's all right!" said Quin with heartfelt satisfaction.
There was something free and easy and gipsy-like about the evening, a sort of fireside picnic that brought June dreams in January. As the hours wore on, the singing, which had been noisy and rollicking, gradually mellowed into sentiment, a sentiment that found vent in dreamy eyes and long-drawn-out choruses, with a languorous over-accentuation of the sentimental passages. One by one, the singers fell under the spell of the music and the firelight. Cass and Fan Loomis sat shoulder to shoulder on the broken-springed couch and gazed with blissful oblivion into the red embers on the hearth. Rose, whose voice led all the rest, surreptitiously wiped her eyes when no one was looking; Edwin and Myrna, solemnly plucking their banjo and guitar, were lost in moods of dormant emotion; while Papa Claude at the piano let his dim eyes range the pictured walls, while his memory traveled back through the years on many a secret tryst of its own.
But it was the lank Sergeant with the big feet, and the hair that stood up where it shouldn't, who dared to dream the most preposterous dream of them all. For, as he sang there in the firelight, a little god was busy lighting the tapers in the most sacred shrines of his being, until he felt like a cathedral at high mass with all the chimes going.
"There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams."