"Like a proud man who was trampling on the heart he had torn from his bosom to save his pride; pale, cynical, melancholy, defiant—pshaw! That sounds like a novel, doesn't it, Lulu?"
"Poor Paul Winans!" she answered only; but the compassion in her voice for him was not so great as the pained sympathy that looked out of her speaking glance for Bruce Conway.
For Lulu saw with preternaturally clear vision, the struggle that was waging in the young man's soul; saw how truth, and honor and every principle of right were battling for one end—the overthrow of the love that having struck down its intertwining roots in his soul for years, was hard to be torn up. She pitied him—and, ah! pity is so near akin to love.
Something of her pity he read in her expressive face, and straightway set himself to work to dispel her gloom. Bruce never could bear to see the face of a beauty overshadowed.
"Brownie, have you tried that new song I sent you yesterday?"
Lulu confessed she had not.
"Try it now, then," he answered, rising, and throwing open the piano.
She rose, smiling and happy once more, and took the seat at the piano. He leaned by her side to turn the pages, and presently their voices rose softly together in a sweet and plaintive love-song. But his heart was full of another, and, as he turned the pages for Lulu with patient gallantry, he remembered how he had turned them for another, how his voice had risen thrillingly with hers in sweeter songs than this, mingling with her bird-like notes as it never should "mingle again."