“The boys are coming after us—­we don’t know how.  Doesn’t that give you courage to face the evening?” murmured Josephine, and the expression on Janet’s face became decidedly more hopeful.

“But how can they come?  They’ve only your brother’s car!” she said in Josephine’s ear.

“Don’t know, and don’t care.  They’ll come—­and rescue us from our fate.”

They felt, during the following hours, that they needed the cheering prospect of a merry home-going, to enable them to bear the rigours of the form of entertainment offered them.  It was not that the affair differed much from affairs of its sort, but the fact that it did not materially differ might have been what made it seem so tiresome.  Possibly the effect of a summer of out-door, home merrymaking, under the least conventional of conditions, had been to make formal entertaining under a roof seem more than ordinarily fatiguing and pointless.  The handsome rooms were hot, in spite of open windows; the guests quite evidently were making heroic efforts to seem gay.  Somehow even Janet’s brilliant music stirred only a perfunctory sort of applause.

“Never played so badly in my life,” whispered the performer, when she regained Josephine’s side, after her second number.

“You played perfectly, as you always do.”

“I played like an automaton—­a ‘piano-player.’  Don’t pretend you don’t know the difference.”

“I understand, of course.  But, you know, we shouldn’t really like to have you play for the bishop and these people as you do for us on your own piano.”

“The poor bishop!  Doesn’t he look like a martyr?  I’m sure he’s delightful—­in his own library, or at his friends’ dinner-tables—­but he hates this sort of thing.  He’s beautifully polite, but he’s bored.  My only hope is that Con will revive him.  It’s her turn next.”

If anything could revive a weary bishop, who had that day attended two funerals and a diocesan convention, it would be both the sight and the sound of Miss Constance Carew.

“Isn’t she dear?” breathed Sally, in Josephine’s ear, as Constance took her place, her slender, gray-clad figure and interest-stirring face a notable contrast to the personality of the professional singer who had opened the program of occasional numbers, interspersed through an evening of—­so-called—­conversation.  Sally’s hands were unconsciously clasped tight all through the song, and her eyes left the singer’s face only long enough to observe that the bishop’s tired eyes were also fixed upon the creator of all those wonderful, liquid notes, and to fancy that, for the moment, at least, he forgot how hot his neck was inside his close, clerical neckwear.

“That pays me for coming,” was the reward Constance had from Sally, whose praise she had somehow come to value more highly than that of most people she knew.  Sally might be no musician herself, but she was a most sympathetic listener, and could appreciate the points singers love to have appreciated, as few people can.