The song he liked best of all was the song of the hunt. I think he liked the audacity with which she appropriated his peaked hat and perched it jauntily on her own head and caught away his cane to use for a riding crop. "This song," she would explain joyously, "is for autumn, when all the men and women are waiting on their restless horses for the master of the hunt to blow his horn—" Her cupped hands at her lips made a beautiful horn and her whistle rang valiantly in the great ceilinged room but the hunting song usually lost itself in a whirr of laughter and frills as the huntress dropped breathless on the footstool at the Major's side and put her sleek head against his knee.
"Grandy," she whispered once, "You stub-stub-stubborn man! Why don't you learn to pretend! Why don't you make believe they're all here?" she waved her hand toward the portraits around them! "I pretend they're proud, proud, proud I'm here! It must have been vairee stupid for them before I came!"
The Major was not her only audience. She frequently "pretended" for Margot and Piqueur and Bele, prancing gaily-about them in their snug kitchen on the long winter evenings when they huddled by their fire. For them she whistled all the droll bits of Marthy's songs that she remembered. Piqueur only listened solemnly, with his smothered briar pipe held politely in his hand; but Margot, buxom, and red cheeked with her iron gray hair tucked under her flaring cap would sit and gape and laugh and quite forget her knitting whenever she could hear,
"He who would woo a widow must not dally He must make hay while the sun doth shine He must not say 'Widow, be mine—be mine!—'"
Felicia's absurd whine for the timorous lover always made Bele snort from his corner,
"But boldly cry 'Widow, thou MUST—'"
Ah, the deep contralto of that boyish voice of hers roundly mouthing the pompous swain's wooing!
She could always make Margot cry when she "pretended" The Wreck of the Polly Ann—with her gray eyes wide with excitement as she described the rolling waves from the top of the rigging! I don't suppose she ever knew all of the words of any of these songs or ballads, she never did any of them quite the same any time, but she caught at the plot and she babbled a scrap or two of the chorus and she always knew every lilting turn of the tunes.
There was one "pretend" she could only do when she was alone. She did not try it often. Sometimes on the spring nights when the tender breezes let the half-awakened wistaria flutter outside her window, she would blow out all her candles and lean far across the sill and stare at her unfinished garden.
And when the house was still, oh, heart-breakingly still, she would kneel beside the bed and whisper,