Sustained by the joy of service, Rose asked no more.  Only to plan little surprises for him, to anticipate every unspoken wish, to keep him cheery and hopeful, to read or play to him without being asked—­these things were as the life-blood to her heart.

She had blossomed, too, into a new beauty.  The forty years had put lines of silver into her hair, but had been powerless to do more.  Her lovely face, where the colour came and went, the fleeting dimple at the corner of her mouth and the crimson curve of her lips were eloquent with the finer, more subtle charm of maturity.  Her shining eyes literally transfigured her.  In their dark depths was a mysterious exaltation, as from some secret, holy rapture too great for words.

Allison saw and felt it, yet did not know what it was.  Once at sunset, when they were talking idly of other things, he tried to express it.

“I don’t know what it is, Rose, but there’s something about you lately that makes me feel—­well, as though I were in a church at an Easter service.  The sun through the stained glass window, the blended fragrance of incense and lilies, and the harp and organ playing the Intermezzo from Cavalleria—­all that sort of thing, don’t you know?”

“Why shouldn’t your best friend be glad,” she had answered gently, “when you have come to your own Easter—­your rising from the dead?”

The dull colour surged into his face, then retreated in waves.  “If you can be as glad as that,” he returned, clearing his throat, “I’d be a brute ever to let myself be discouraged again.”

That night, during a wakeful hour, his thoughts went back to Isabel.  For the first time, he saw the affair in its true light—­a brief, mad infatuation.  He had responded to Isabel’s youth and beauty and an old moonlit garden full of roses much as his violin answered to his touch upon the strings.  “Had answered,” he corrected himself, trying not to flinch at the thought.

Even if his hand should heal, it was scarcely possible that he would ever play again, and he knew, as well as anyone, what brilliant promise the future had held for him.  He remembered how wisely he had been trained from the very beginning; how Aunt Francesca had insisted upon mathematics, Latin, and chemistry, as well as literature, history, and modern languages.

He had protested to her only once.  She had replied kindly, but firmly, that while broad culture and liberal education might not, in itself, create an artist, yet it could not possibly injure one.  Since then, he had seen precocious children, developed in one line at the expense of all others, fail ignominiously in maturity because there was no foundation.  The Child Wonder who had thrilled all Europe at nine, by his unnatural mastery of the violin, was playing in an orchestra in a Paris cafe, where one of the numerous boy sopranos was the head waiter.

How disappointed Aunt Francesca must be, even though she had too much self-control to show it!  And his father!  Allison swallowed a lump in his throat.  After a lifetime of self-sacrificing devotion, the Colonel had seen all his efforts fail, but he had taken the blow standing, like the soldier that he was.  In vain, many a time, Allison had wished that some of his father’s fine courage might have been transmitted to him.