"I have heard you play the songs to which you refer," Dorris replied musingly, "and I have thought that you played them with so much expression that, could their authors have listened to the performance, they would have discovered new beauties in them. I never knew a player before who could render the words of a song as well as the music. You do it, and with so much genius that I wonder that you have nothing but the cold, passionless notes to guide you. One dark afternoon you played 'I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,' and a savage could have told what the words were. The entire strength of the organ seemed to be united in the mournful air, and the timid accompaniment was peopled with the other characters in the play from which the song is taken. That represented you; but you have had me before the organ, telling all I knew, a hundred times. Although you have refused to hear my story, you seem to know it; for you have told it on the organ as many times as I have thought of it."
"If I have told your story on the organ," the girl said, "there must have been declarations in it that you were a brave, an honorable, and an unfortunate man, for I have always thought that of you. In spite of all you have said to me against yourself, I have never doubted this for a moment, and I would trust you to any extent."
"If I expect to carry out my resolution," Allan Dorris replied, as though in anger, though it was really an unspoken protest against doing a disagreeable thing, "I must hear no more of this; a very little more of what you have said, and retreat will be impossible. But before I leave you, let me say this: You once said I was an odd man; I will tell you why. I seem to be an odd man because you have heard every sentiment there is in my heart; I have kept nothing back. The men you have known were close-mouthed and suspicious, knowing that whatever they said was likely to be repeated, and this made them cautious. Place other men in my situation as to loneliness and misfortune, and I would not seem so unusual. There are plenty of staid business men who are as 'odd' as I am, but they have never been moved to tell their secrets, as I have done to you. Even were your honorable father to express the love he feels for your dead mother, it would sound sentimental and foolish, and surprise his acquaintances; but rest assured that every man will turn out a strange creature when you get his confidence. I say this in justice to myself, but it is the truth. When you know any man thoroughly, you either think more or less of him."