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142 ficulty, in which case he gave one look at the lady, and fled without opening the subject.

It could not be said that he appeared more cheerful, the sole sign of any increased exhilaration of spirits being the occasional straightening of his cravat and the smoothing of his hair—refinements of toilet that had heretofore been much neglected, though he always looked unmistakably the gentleman.

He seemed more attracted by Lisa than by any of the smaller children; but that may have been because Mary had told him her story, thinking that other people’s stories were a useful sort of thing to tell people who had possible stories of their own.

Lisa was now developing a curious and unexpected facility and talent in the musical games. She played the tambourine, the triangle, the drum, as nobody else could, and in accompanying the marches she invented all sorts of unusual beats and accents. It grew to be the natural thing to give her difficult parts in the little dramas of child life: the cock that crowed in the morn to wake the sleeping birds and babies, the mother bird in the nest, the spreading willow-tree in the pond where the frogs con-