Strangely enough, he understood the question of her eyes. She flushed like a girl as he nodded gravely. "'Annie Laurie,'" he said.
"I am very glad," said she, with a long breath. "It reconciles me to selling my art in that way. No, I'm very glad, quite outside of that."
Tom Osby did not quite follow all her thoughts, but he went on.
"It was 'Annie Laurie,'" said he. "I knew you sung it. Ma'am, I played her all the way from Vegas down."
"But why did you come?" She was cruel; but a woman must have her toll. The renewed answer cost courage of Tom Osby.
"Ma'am," said he, "I won't lie to you. I just come to see you, or to hear you, I can't rightly tell which. It must have been both." Now he arose and flung out a hand, rudely but eloquently. "Ma'am," he went on, "I knowed you come from Georgy onct, the same as me. And I knowed that a Georgy girl, someway, somewhere, somehow, would have a soft spot in her heart. I come to hear you sing. There's things that us fellers want, sometimes."
The woman before him drew a deep, long breath.
"I reckon you'll have to sing again," the man went on. "You'll have to sing that there song, 'Annie Laurie,' like I heard it more than onct, before I went away from home."
The soft Georgia speech came back to his tongue, and she followed it herself, unconsciously.
"My friend," said she, "you're right. I reckon I'll have to sing."