“Why, how—how dreadful!” stammered Billy.
“Oh, but they don't think it's dreadful at all,” corrected Arkwright, quickly. “For twenty-five cents they can hear all that you hear down in your orchestra chair, for which you've paid so high a premium.”
“But who—who are they? Where do they come from? Who would go and stand hours like that to get a twenty-five-cent seat?” questioned Billy.
“Who are they? Anybody, everybody, from anywhere? everywhere; people who have the music hunger but not the money to satisfy it,” he rejoined. “Students, teachers, a little milliner from South Boston, a little dressmaker from Chelsea, a housewife from Cambridge, a stranger from the uttermost parts of the earth; maybe a widow who used to sit down-stairs, or a professor who has seen better days. Really to know that line, you should see it for yourself, Miss Neilson,” smiled Arkwright, as he reluctantly rose to go. “Some Friday, however, before you take your seat, just glance up at that packed top balcony and judge by the faces you see there whether their owners think they're getting their twenty-five-cents' worth, or not.”
“I will,” nodded Billy, with a smile; but the smile came from her lips only, not her eyes: Billy was wishing, at that moment, that she owned the whole of Symphony Hall—to give away. But that was like Billy. When she was seven years old she had proposed to her Aunt Ella that they take all the thirty-five orphans from the Hampden Falls Orphan Asylum to live with them, so that little Sallie Cook and the other orphans might have ice cream every day, if they wanted it. Since then Billy had always been trying—in a way—to give ice cream to some one who wanted it.
Arkwright was almost at the door when he turned abruptly. His face was an abashed red. From his pocket he had taken a small folded paper.
“Do you suppose—in this—you might find—that melody?” he stammered in a low voice. The next moment he was gone, having left in Billy's fingers a paper upon which was written in a clear-cut, masculine hand six four-line stanzas.
Billy read them at once, hurriedly, then more carefully.
“Why, they're beautiful,” she breathed, “just beautiful! Where did he get them, I wonder? It's a love song—and such a pretty one! I believe there is a melody in it,” she exulted, pausing to hum a line or two. “There is—I know there is; and I'll write it—for Bertram,” she finished, crossing joyously to the piano.
Half-way down Corey Hill at that moment, Arkwright was buffeting the wind and snow. He, too, was thinking joyously of those stanzas—joyously, yet at the same time fearfully. Arkwright himself had written those lines—though not for Bertram.