“‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’” she quoted.  “Inconsistency goes as far toward making life attractive as its pleasures do toward spoiling it.”

“What do you call pleasure?” queried Allison.

“The unsought joy.  If you go out to hunt for it, you don’t often get it.  When you do, you’ve earned it and are entitled to it.  True pleasure is a free gift of the gods, like a sense of humour.”

By some oblique and unsuspected way, the words brought a certain comfort to Rose.  Without bitterness, she remembered that Allison had once said:  “In any true mating, they both know.”  Over and over again she said to herself, stubbornly:  “I will have nothing that is not true—­nothing that is not true.”

It was a wise hostess who discovered the fact that changing rooms may change moods; that many a successful dinner has an aftermath in the drawing-room as cold and dismal as a party call.  Madame Francesca had once characterised the hour after dinner as “the stick of a sky-rocket, which never fails to return and bring disillusion with it.”  Hence she postponed it as long as she could, but the Colonel himself gave the signal by moving back his chair.

An awkward pause followed, which lasted until Rose went to the piano of her own accord and began to play.  At length she drifted into the running chords of a familiar accompaniment and Allison took his violin and joined in.  As he stood by Rose, the mere fact of his nearness brought her a strange peace.  Had she looked up, she would have seen that though he stood so near her, he had eyes only for Isabel and was playing to her alone.

Isabel did not seem to care.  She sat with her hands folded idly in her lap, occasionally glancing at the twins who sat together on a sofa across the room.  Madame Bernard and the Colonel had gone out on the balcony that opened off of the library.

The night was cool, yet had in it the softness of May.  Every wandering wind brought a subtle, exquisite fragrance from orchards blooming afar.  High in the heavens swung the pale gold moon of Spring.

“What a night,” said Madame, almost in a whisper.  “It seems almost as if there never had been another Spring.”

“And as if there never would be another.”

“That may be true, for one or both of us,” she replied, with unwonted sadness.

“My work is done,” sighed the Colonel.  “I have only to wait now.”

“Sometimes I think that all of Life is waiting,” she went on, with a little catch in her voice, “and yet we never know what we were waiting for, unless—­when all is done—­”

A warm, friendly hand closed over hers.  “Do not question too much, dear friend, for the God who ordained the beginning can safely be trusted with the end, as well as with all that lies between.  Do you know,” he continued, in a different tone, “a night like this always makes me think of those wonderful lines: