Allison smiled ironically.  How transparent she was!

She wanted him to go to sleep and when he awoke, she would tell him that Rose had been there, and had played, and had just gone.

“No,” he answered, “I don’t want to go to sleep.  I want to hear Rose play.”

So he waited, persistently wide awake.  Sharpened by illness and pain, his hearing was phenomenally acute; so much so that even a whisper in the next room was distinctly audible.  He heard the distant rumble of wheels, approaching steadily, and wondered why the house did not tremble when the carriage stopped.  He heard the lower door open softly, then close, a quick, light step in the living room, the old-fashioned piano stool whirling on its rusty axis, then a few slow, deep chords prefacing a familiar bit of Chopin.

He turned to the nurse, who sat in her low rocking-chair at the window.  “I beg your pardon.  I thought you were not telling me the truth.”

The young woman only smiled in answer.  “Listen!”

From downstairs the music came softly.  Rose was playing with the exquisite taste and feeling that characterised everything she did.  She purposely avoided the extremes of despair and joy, keeping to the safe middle-ground.  Living waters murmured through the melody, the sea surged and crooned, flying clouds went through blue, sunny spaces, and birds sang, ever with an unfailing uplift, as of many wings.

Allison’s calmness insensibly changed, not in degree, but in quality, as the piano magically brought before him green distances lying fair beneath the warm sun, clover-scented meadows and blossoming boughs.  “Life,” he said to himself; “life more abundant.”

She drifted from one thing to another, playing snatches of old songs, woven together by modulations of her own making.  At last she paused to think of something else, but her fingers remembered, and began, almost of their own accord: 

[Illustration:  musical notation.]

Allison stirred restlessly, as he recalled how he had heard it before.  He saw the drifted petals of fallen roses, the moon-shadow on the dial, hours wrong, the spangled cobwebs in the grass and the other spangles, changed to faint iridescence in the enchanted light as Isabel came toward him and into his open arms.  Could marble respond to a lover’s passion, could dead lips answer with love for love, then Isabel might have yielded to him at least a tolerant tenderness.  He saw her now, alien and apart, like some pale star that shone upon a barren waste, but never for him.

Another phrase, full of love and longing, floated up the stairway and entered his room, a guest unbidden.

[Illustration:  musical notation.]

He turned to the nurse.  “Ask Miss Bernard to come up for a few minutes, will you?”

“Do you think it’s wise?” she temporised.

“Please ask her to come up,” he said, imperatively.  “Must I call her myself?”