“Must be Rose, then,” said the Colonel, half to himself, “but I thought nobody knew where she was.”

“Love will find a way,” hummed Doctor Jack.  “I suppose you don’t care to go for a ride this afternoon?”

“Not I,” laughed the Colonel.  “Why don’t you take Juliet?”

“All right, since you ask me to.  I wonder,” he continued to himself, as he went toward Madame Bernard’s at the highest rate of speed, “just how a fellow would go to work to find a woman who had left no address?  Sixth sense, I suppose, or perhaps seventh or eighth.”

Yet Allison was doing very well, with only the five senses of the normal human being to aid him in his search.  He left the train at the sleepy little place known as “Holly Springs,” and walked up the main road as though he knew the way.

“Half a mile,” he said to himself, “and a little brown house in the woods with a brook singing in front of it.  Ought to get to it pretty soon.”

The prattling brook was half asleep in its narrow channel, but the gentle murmur was audible to one who stopped in the road to listen.  It did not cross the road, but turned away, frightened, from the dusty highway of a modest civilisation, and went back into the woods, where it met another brook and travelled to the river in company.

The house, just back of the singing stream, was a little place, as Madame Bernard had said, but, though he rapped repeatedly, no one answered.  So he lifted the latch and cautiously stepped in.

A grand piano, unblushingly new, and evidently of recent importation from the city, occupied most of the tiny living-room.  The embers of a wood fire lay on the hearth and the room was faintly scented with the sweet smoke of hard pine.  A well-known and well-worn sonata was on the music rack; a volume of Chopin had fallen to the floor.  Allison picked it up, and put it in its place.  On the piano was some of his own music, stamped with his Berlin address.

A familiar hat, trimmed with crushed roses, lay on the window seat.  The faint, indefinable scent of attar of roses was dimly to be discerned as a sort of background for the fragrant smoke.  An open book lay face downward on the table; a bit of dainty needlework was thrown carelessly across the chair.  An envelope addressed to “Madame Francesca Bernard” was on the old-fashioned writing desk, and a single page of rose-stamped paper lay near it, bearing, in a familiar hand:  “My Dearest.”

The two words filled Allison with panic.  Not knowing how Rose was wont to address the little old lady they both loved, he conjured up the forbidding spectre of The Other Man, that had haunted him for weeks past.

Sighing, he sat down at the piano, and began to drum idly, with one hand.  “Wonder if I could use the other,” he thought.  “Pretty stiff, I guess.”

He began to play, from memory: 

[Illustration:  musical notation]

and outside a woman paused, almost at the threshold, with her hands upon her heart.  In a sudden throb of pain, the old days came back.  She saw herself at the piano, aching with love and longing, while just beyond, in an old moonlit garden, Allison made love to Isabel.