Dora gave vent to her feelings by an indignant sniff.
“I suppose that’s why you don’t go to school,” she said.
“Oh, no; my brother sends the money for my education, but Mrs. Marsh didn’t happen to know of any good school, so her sister Miss Talcott, who used to teach in a school, said she would give me lessons every afternoon. I used to go to her apartment every day till January, but then a friend invited her to go to California, so I don’t have any lessons now. Miss Talcott is very nice and I liked having lessons with her, but she has a great many engagements and quite often she had to be out all the afternoon. I didn’t mind much, because she used to let me stay and play on her piano, and I loved that.”
“Well, come along and give us a tune now,” said Dora, good-naturedly, and Gretel from whose face the momentary cloud had vanished, left her seat in the window, and hastened to open the piano.
It was true that Gretel had forgotten much of the music her father had taught her. It was more than a year since the musical education from which poor Hermann Schiller had hoped such great things, had come to a sudden standstill. But Gretel still played remarkably well for a child of her age, and as her fingers wandered lovingly over the keys of Mrs. Marsh’s rather cracked piano, a strange, rapt look came into her face, and for the moment everything else in the world was forgotten. Dora, secure in the knowledge that the family could not return for several hours, curled herself up comfortably on the parlor sofa. But Dora, though fond of music of a certain kind, was not quite up to Chopin and Mendelssohn, and as Gretel played on and on, a sensation of comfortable drowsiness began to steal over her, and ere long her eyes had closed, and she was fast asleep.
Serenely unconscious of this fact Gretel played on, now a bit of one half-forgotten melody, now another, and as she played she forgot her present surroundings—forgot that she was no longer the child pianist, to whom her father’s friends had listened with astonishment and pride—but only a poor little Cinderella left alone in her shabby black frock, while Mrs. Marsh and her daughter went to fairy-land. She seemed to see again the big, half-furnished studio, that had once been home, and Hermann Schiller and his German friends, smoking their pipes as they listened to her playing, always ready with a burst of applause when her father called out in his kind cheery voice, “Enough for to-night, Liebchen—time to give one of the others a turn.” It all seemed so real that for one moment she glanced up, half expecting to see the familiar scene, and the row of kindly, interested faces, but it was only Mrs. Marsh’s shabby little parlor, with Dora fast asleep on the sofa. Suddenly a great wave of homesickness swept over the little girl—the music stopped with a crash and dropping her face on the piano keys, Gretel began to cry.
At the sudden pause in the music Dora opened her eyes, and sat up with a start. The next moment she had sprung to her feet.
“Whatever are you crying about?” she demanded in astonishment. “I thought you liked to play.”
“I—I don’t know,” sobbed Gretel. “I think it must be the music. I love it so, and—and I never hear any now. I’m forgetting everything Father taught me, and he would be so unhappy if he knew.”
“There, there, I wouldn’t cry about it if I was you,” soothed Dora, laying a kind hand on one of the child’s heaving shoulders. “It’s too bad, and I’m real sorry for you, but maybe we can manage for you to hear some music if you’re so crazy about it. My sister Lillie has a lovely voice, and she’d be real glad to come and sing for you some time, I know. My little brother Peter plays the piano, too, though he’s never had a lesson in his life. Music just seems to come to him natural, and he makes up things as he goes along. Father’s going to try and get him into vaudeville.”