FOUR-LEAF CLOVERS.

The steel-blue arc light showed that the figure in the gloom of the conservatory steps was Langdon, though when Kebler had walked briskly up, he had hesitated, on account of the younger man's disturbed look, to accost him. Quickly deciding, however, that it was a general indisposition to appear at that evening's concert-a feeling which had an echo in Kebler-he called out:

"Langdon!"

"Hello, Kebler. Are you on your way over?"

"Yes. Come along."

"I can't. Burns has all the music, and if I don't look out, he'll have forgotten half the piano parts."

"What are you going to sing, Hal?"

"I don't know."

"Don't know?"

"No, really I do not."

"Is that why you looked so distressed as I came up?"

"Distressed? Why, did I look that way?"

"I should say you did. I was actually hesitating to speak." "Well, they are always expecting flawless eleventh-hour performances. Maybe that was partly the reason I looked so. Why, Burns and I haven't even had a chance to rehearse!"

"Never mind," said Kebler, "you're not the only one in trouble." "Who told you I was in trouble?" demanded Langdon.

"Why, you did."

"Oh yes, of course-having to sing without rehearsal."
"Yes. What else should I mean?"

"Nothing, nothing. But what has happened to you, Kebler ?"

"The same old thing. Mrs. Dorrance was down for the Beethoven sonata, and she's sprained her wrist. Professor Humphreys declares that the sonata can't be left off the program, so I'm to play it."

"But you have it at your fingers' ends."

"What if I have? Doesn't he know, as well as the people who so kindly tell me to stick to Liszt and Tchaikowski, that I can't play Beethoven? Doesn't he know that people consider me a sort of pianistic icicle?"

Langdon gave an embarrassed laugh, such as we have on hearing some one utter a just, if unpleasant, criticism.

"Come! Come!" he said. "If I were a professor and played faultlessly, I wouldn't-"

"Oh yes," groaned Kebler, comically, perhaps to hide a deeper pang, "there it is again, 'played faultlessly.'

"Now, Kebler, you're blue again."

“What if I am? Maybe I have cause to be. Listen to what I overheard just now-but no. I'm not going to tell you—at least, now. We'll talk it all over later. I must go along and get my hands warm. You'll be up to my room afterwards?".

"Who's to be there?"

"Oh, the regular crowd."

"I'm not sure that I can come."

"But you must. Think of me!"

"Yes, and think of me, too. Well, I'll come, only don't count on me for any help to keep things going."

"We'll see about that later," said Kebler, and walked briskly through the screen of evergreens which separated the conservatory from the broad-shouldered old church, where the audience was already beginning to gather.

The withdrawing-room was empty and cold, and Kebler was glad of it. He had some thinking, which could best be done alone, and the

cold never annoyed him. The place had the further convenience that he could hear only when he chose to listen, and he chose to listen only to the Liszt Polonaise, which was to come later. The room was a fair result of the zeal of church-going ladies, being furnished with a prim Puritan brood of hair-cloth furniture, lighted by a green-globed incandescent lamp, and presided over by an old print of Mozart, under the protection of the melodious muse. Kebler rolled the largest, chilliest chair over to the window, and, throwing himself into its frigid embrace, sat tapping his strong, white fingers on the window ledge, watching the shadows cast upon the smooth, snowy floor of the campus by the swaying evergreens. It would have been an excellent gibe of his enemies to remark now, that Kebler was temperamentally so cold that a mere matter of temperature did not count.

He had played the Beethoven sonata, and he had not played well He knew it; he always knew. And this was not because he had been called upon unexpectedly. He had had the work well in hand. But the trouble was deeper down. Never was it more evident than when he played Beethoven that Kebler sat at the piano-forte with a sort of contemptuous ease, as though bored at being asked to do what others considered difficult. That this was not the proper state of mind to bring to Beethoven, he was willing to admit, but he was even less inclined than usual to play with great fervidness of spirit, on account of something he had started to tell Langdon, and deferred.

Just before meeting Langdon, he had overheard the following conversation:

"Who is that broad-shouldered fellow going along over there?" "That? Oh, that's young Professor Kebler."

"Well, who's he?"

"A fellow who can do anything, and doesn't."

"A fellow who can do anything." Kebler had never permitted himself to put it that way, though it had been with some such feeling that these kind professors had sent him, a raw, red-handed boy, over the great water to fulfill high hopes. And, in a way, he had not failed

to fulfill them. He had done all he set out to do. His ambition had never included the "fine frenzy," whose visible outward expression is towsled hair and wilted linen. In the elegant diction of the critics, he aimed to make his playing "broad, thoughtful, and scholarly." And when he gave his recitals in Berlin, that was practically what was said of him.

On his return it had been much the same way. After a few performances, Kebler's reception became merely a comfortable settling in seats and a murmur that "now we were to have something worth while." If a few put on their furs while he played, they were reminded that it is not enough that many should know how to play, enthusiastically; a few must know how to play right. At first it gave him an odd feeling that people should take his return to teach in the conservatory so much as a matter of course. Even though it was a custom with talented graduates to linger a few years after teachers had done their part, in order to learn from pupils, Kebler had somehow felt, as a few of us do now and then, that there was something special in his study abroad, and his return to teach. The professors said: "Give Kebler time to practice, and to fall in love; then look for a high-water mark for American pianists!"

The practicing, to be sure, he had done. Night after night the light had burned in his tower studio. But now he was equipped with the skill that ten years before he had deemed necessary to his artistic armament. The probation was over. As proof of this, witness Borowsky. The night he had accompanied Borowsky in the concerto, that artist had not been slow to recognize an equal.

"Why, man," he cried, when the shouting and clapping was over, "all you need is about one month over in Berlin with old Kiepert, and you can do anything you please! What on earth are you hanging around here for? Are you in love?"

"On the contrary," laughed Kebler, in his reticent way, "people say that I'm hanging around here simply because I'm not in love."

He had failed, you perceive, to fulfill the second condition, a delinquency which canceled the former qualification. He miserably knew, first, that at large he was regarded as the animated shade of a dead ambition; and second, that his immense technical skill had been developed at the expense of his natural affection.

Outside there was a sudden noise of hand-clapping. Kebler started and looked at his program. It must have been the Liszt Polonaise, but he had not heard a note of it. He was sorry, for Morgan, with all his faults, played well, and was much better liked, he knew, than he himself, for all his flawlessness. But Kebler was to hear Morgan that evening, after all. The applause had not been for the Liszt Polonaise, but for the appearance of the soloist, and a few moments later, Morgan was playing, in his faulty, enthusiastic way, a great, gorgeous, crimson-and-gold concerto.

If at such times enthusiasm is contagious, it communicated itself to Kebler. Acting on different natures, as the same news excites one man to laughter, and another to tears, this enthusiasm, while provoking most of the auditory to loud applause, fell like a warm rain upon the hidden bulb of Kebler's buried ambition. It swelled; it rose; it made its throbs deafeningly felt at his ears; it made his finger-tips burn.

At first he felt foolish. But his next feeling was that of a freezing man who is shown a fireplace without fuel. For what made Morgan's playing-as Morgan himself laughingly confessed-was nine parts enthusiasm and one part ability-nothing else than an emotion utterly foreign to Kebler-call it “temperament," "sympathy," or what you please. It had transfigured Morgan's second-rate performance, as we overlook the very mistakes of a good man, because they are what make him lovable.

As Kebler sat there, wearily turning these matters over in his mind, there came to him from without, the words of a song sung by a fresh young tenor voice which he knew very well. The song was simple, as the music of birds and brooks is simple: