“That settles it,” Katherine arose. “I’m going right up to Jimmie and bring matters to a climax, by revealing to him just who I am. Right into the office I go and say, ‘Jimmie, here comes the Lady Katherine Elaine Anders-Mackenzie Deal, great-great-granddaughter of Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, who had flowing white fingers and a long reddish-brown nose that tapered at the end.”

When the door had closed behind her, Abbie sighed and said, “Whatever are you going to do with her, Emma?”

“Oh, she’s all right, Mother.” Emma was always like Sarah, her mother, good-natured, easy-going. “She’s just breezy. She tells me everything.” Mrs. Mackenzie Deal temporarily disregarded the recollection of some of the things Katherine had told her.

When they had all gone, Abbie took a great deal of comfort with her new radio. The dull-finished, beautifully-polished cabinet put a new interest in life for her. At first in the wonderment of the thing, she rubbed the Aladdin lamp all day long. Sermons, jazz bands, market reports, monologues, she listened to them all with equal interest and amazement. A sermon from Denver, a talk on fruit tree culture from Lincoln, a dance orchestra from Omaha, interested her with equal intensity. Preaching and pruning and prancing, they were all the same to her. And when “The Ring of the Piper’s Tune” came in, she shut her eyes and saw her Irish mother lift her skirts and do the Kerry dance as lightly as a thistledown.

“My, I wish you could hear the music, Will.”

I’ve heard wondrous music, Abbie.

“There’s nothing more now, Will, that can be invented.”

There are things undreamed of, Abbie-girl.

And then Abbie had a letter from Isabelle. She was to sing from a Chicago station on February third.

“Find the station beforehand, Mother,” Isabelle wrote, “so you’ll not have any trouble that night or lose time trying to locate it while the program is on.”

On the night of the third, Abbie sat up later than was her custom, so that she could hear Isabelle. Even then she experienced a little trouble in getting the station. “I suppose nothing’s just perfect,” she thought. “We always have to have some little grief to make us . . .” Suddenly she had them. But the program had begun. Isabelle’s voice came forth in an aria as plainly as though she were in the room. When she had finished, the announcer spoke. “Mrs. Rhodes will sing her second number especially for her mother, listening in at Cedartown, Nebraska.”

The piano, with violin accompaniment, played a few notes and then Isabelle’s voice came again, full and clear:

“Oh, the Lady of the Lea

Fair and young and gay was she

Beautiful exceedingly

The Lady of the Lea.”

And then it came to Abbie Deal. That was it,—the little half-memory! That was the old strain that had haunted her and which she could not quite remember.

“Many a wooer sought her hand

For she had gold and she had land . . .”