DEAR MR. KING: 

It is the most wonderful thing in the world to be sitting up far enough to be able to write and tell you how sorry I am that you are lying down.  But Mrs. Burns assures me that you are fast improving and that soon you will be about again.  Meanwhile you are turning your time of waiting to a glorious account in teaching poor Franz to speak English.  Surely he must have been longing to speak it, so that he might tell you the things in his heart—­about that dreadful night.  But I know you don’t want me to write of that, and I won’t.

Of course I should care to have him play for me, and I hope he may do it soon—­to-morrow, perhaps.  I wonder if he knows the Schubert “Fruehlingstraum”—­how I should love to hear it!  As for your interesting plan for relieving the passing hours, I should hardly be human if I did not respond to it!  Only please never write when you don’t feel quite like it—­and neither will I.

The white lilacs were even more beautiful than the roses and the daffodils.  There was a long row of white lilac trees at one side of a garden I used to play in—­I shall never, never forget what that fragrance was like after a rain!  And now that my sun is shining again—­after the rain—­you may imagine what those white lilacs breathe of to me.

     With the best of good wishes,

     ANNE LINTON.

Jordan King read this note through three times before he folded it back into its original creases.  Then he shut it away in a leather-bound writing tablet which lay by his side.  “Franz,” he said, addressing the youth who was at this hour of the day his sole attendant, “can you play Schubert’s ’Fruehlingstraum’?”

He had to repeat this title several times, with varying accents, before he succeeded in making it intelligible.  But suddenly Franz leaped to an understanding.

“Yess—­yess—­yess—­yess—­sair,” he responded joyously, and made a dive for his violin case.

“Softly, Franz,” warned his master.  As this was a word which had thus far been often used in his education, on account of the fact that the hospital did not belong exclusively to King—­strange as that might seem to Franz who worshipped him—­it was immediately comprehended.  Without raising the tones of his instrument, Franz was able presently to make clear to King that the music he was asked to play was of the best at his command.

“No wonder she likes that,” was King’s inward comment.  “It’s a strange, weird thing, yet beautiful in a haunting sort of way, I imagine, to a girl like her, and I don’t know but it would be to me if I heard it many times—­while I was smelling lilacs in the rain,” he added, smiling to himself.

That hint of a garden had rather taken hold of his imagination.  More than likely, he said to himself, it had been her own garden—­only she would not tell him so lest she seem to try to convey an idea of former prosperity.  A different sort of girl would have said “our garden.”