To all these suggestions he returned a polite, "No, I thank you, mother." No tuning or feeding could help either the piano or Richard now.
Once he turned upon his mother with a question.
"Mother, do you mean to say that during all these years, you and Mrs. Bent have never exchanged a word about—this matter?"
"She came up to me once on the street with her little girl," confessed Mrs. Lister tremulously. "But of course I couldn't talk to her there—or anywhere!"
"What did she say?"
"She said she wanted to talk to me about Basil."
Finally Mrs. Lister yielded her citadel.
"Richard, your father and I have been talking about music. We think that when you get your clavier with your Commencement money, we had better get a piano also. Father thinks I should go with you to Baltimore and that it would be well to ask Thomasina to go too. You could have it to practice on now, and then it would be here when you came from—from New York, Richard."
Richard made no answer.
"Would you like that, dear?"