Page:Solo (1924).pdf/19

 sung her solo, he did so merely because that implied a right to explain at equal length how he had played his prelude and interlude and postlude, and Aunt Verona at times fairly gloated, though she usually concluded with some such comment as, "Ah, but wait till you've mastered the new octave studies. It doesn't do to be easily satisfied. Nothing's so deadly as that."

One idiosyncrasy of Aunt Verona's puzzled him more than all the others. Ever since he had been considered big enough to march off to church she had exacted that he should memorize the text of the sermon, which she promptly wrote down on a ragged piece of brown paper and stuffed into a drawer of a cabinet on the kitchen dresser. What she meant to do with the texts, or why she collected them, Paul could not, after considerable straining of mind, imagine. Often, on Sunday afternoons, he had caught her bursting into a thin laugh and repeating one or two words of the morning text, and this day was no exception, for as she went to the stove to get the coffee he heard her muttering, with a nameless sort of relish, "Toil not—to be sure . . . spin . . . Heaven protect my wits!"

Not for worlds would Paul have ventured to inquire why Aunt Verona persisted in this rite, yet he would no more have dared forget the text than neglect saying his prayers, for if he did he knew that one of those blank expressions would come into Aunt Verona's face and she would go off to the playroom and sit for hours looking out of the window at the cherry tree, whilst he suffered inconsolable miseries of guilt at having been careless enough to let the pattern of life go "crookedy," to play a false note, as it were. Once he had forgotten, and on the spur of the moment invented a substitute, an old Sunday-school "golden" text that had leapt to his tongue as a very present help, and she had unsuspectingly written it down and stuffed it into the drawer. That had