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anything but a comfortable home she had come to;
the big empty rooms were full of a mysterious
terror. As soon as it grew dark, she began to be afraid
and to shudder. She almost died of homesickness.
The long Sunday afternoons were the worst—there
seemed no end to them, nor to the train of
painful thoughts which passed slowly through her
mind.
And so it happened, one Sunday in March, when
Sintram had not returned home after church, she
went upstairs into the salon and sat down at her
harpsichord. It was her only comfort. The old
harpsichord, with a piper and shepherdess painted on
its white cover, was her own property, inherited
from her parents’ home. She could tell it all her
grief, and it would understand.
But is n’t it both pitiful and ridiculous? Can you
guess what she played? A polka—when she was in
such great distress!
Oh, she knew nothing else. Before her fingers
stiffened round the dusting switch and the carver,
she had learned this one polka, and her fingers
remembered it still. She knew no funeral march
nor passionate sonata—not even a mournful
folk-song—nothing but that polka.
And she played it whenever she had anything
to confide to the old clavier; when she could have
wept, and when she wished to laugh. She played it at
her own wedding, when she came to her new home,
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