Nan blushed. "It's just to hold up the music, you know. That's my piano where you are sitting."
"Goodness!" cried the lady, jumping up. "How undignified of me to sit on a piano. Please pardon me; I didn't know."
"Of course not." Nan's eyes grew starlike. It was not only very delightful but very exciting to meet one who so perfectly understood. "You see," she went on, "all I have at home is a dreadful old melodeon that skips notes and wheezes like our old Pete; he has the heaves, you know."
"Poor old Pete," said the lady, with a tender retrospective look in her eyes. "You have the melodeon, yes, and then?"
"Aunt Sarah always wants to take a nap the minute I begin to play, and to-day," her voice dropped and she went nearer to her visitor, "I had made a new tune and I did so want to write it down. I came out here first and tried it; it sounded very well, I thought, but I had written only a little of it when I had to shut the melodeon. Aunt Sarah always does have such inconvenient times for taking naps," she sighed.
"Won't you let me hear your song, or your tune?" said the lady, politely seating herself with an expectant air upon a stump further off.
Nan's cheeks grew redder. She did not like to seem ungracious to this stranger who showed such an unusual interest in her performances and yet her only audience heretofore had been the creatures of the field and the air. "No one has ever heard it but the crows," she said hesitatingly, then impulsively: "You won't laugh?"
"Indeed no, of course not," returned the lady with some real indignation at such a suspicion.
Nan sat still long enough to screw up her courage to the active point, and then drawing from her blouse a bit of paper, she seated herself before her log-piano and began her song. The lady, with cheek in hand, leaned forward and listened intently. Once there was a slight flicker of amusement in her eyes, but for the most part her face was tenderly serious. At the close of the song she said gently: "Thank you, dear. I think that is a very sweet little air for one so young as you to think of. May I see?" She extended her hand for Nan's half-written song. "How will you finish it?" she asked.