I was lying in bed the morning after my meeting with the children, watching the sunmade shadows of the lattice on the wall of my room, the slight, slow movement of the leaves, and was almost away off in sleep again, when I heard the sounds of voices below, a light foot-fall on the stairs, and then a shower of knocks against my door. I called out a "Come in!" and the noisy intruder flung the door wide open, and Neil Barras was at the bedside. The same breezy, manly man, with his blue eyes flashing, and the wavy light hair tossed back on his small, clean-shaped head, just as of old.

In a moment I was shaken well nigh breathless, and after the glad and boisterous greetings were ended, "King Cophetua❞—for I could not rid my thought of the appellation -sat on the bed beside me.

"Now listen. There is not to be a word of refusal. You are to pack up and leave this boarding-house at once, and come over to my brother's, where we can have you as one of ourselves, and you are to stay there, mind, until it is time to go back to the city."

"But I-"

"No 'buts' at all, man. I have not lost a particle of my muscle in these years feel!"

And he doubled up the great arm that I remembered so well, and bent for me to lay my hand upon the biceps.

“And my stubborn love of rule is as strong as ever; so, in spite of all the varied and doubtless potent reasons you may have to advance for wishing to, and the necessity of your staying here, you are coming to the house to-day. My wife-whom you have never met, but who knows you as my 'heart's brother'-sent a special and urgent message, which would take up too much time if delivered, and her invitation and mine are both but postscripts to my brother's commands; so, 'Arise, take up your bed,' etc." And in an instant he had landed me on the strawmatted floor, with no alternative but to bathe and dress as quickly as possible, which I proceeded to do.

cottage belonging to Maurice Barras. Neil, Jr., and Mabel were making sand pies in the yard, and sprung to greet me as I entered the gate.

"M-M-May lost the card you gave her," began the boy, stuttering in his eagerness to be the first to tell me of it; "b-b-but I gave mine to Uncle Neil, and he said, 'G-G-God bless the boy, he hasn't forgotten me, after all!""

I had time only to smile and pat the child's head before a beautiful girl came out upon the piazza, and stood at the top of the steps toward which I walked. She spoke, with an outstretching of the hand, before I reached her.

"You are Mr. Eldridge, I am sure; `we are most glad to welcome you; I speak for Neil and myself, since he has been called away for an hour."

This, then, was Mrs. Barras, the poor girl I had been told of. I believe the astonishment showed in my face, for she was very beautiful.

A sweet, pure, yet womanly face, and her eyes and hair of a rich, deep shade of brown; while even my masculine eye was struck by the easy grace with which she wore her dainty costume of blue muslin, with its trimmings of white lace and black velvet, and the pink coral carved into a spray of wild roses that lay at her throat.

This was my introduction to Madge Barras, my friend's "Wild Rose," and "King Cophetua's" wife.

CHAPTER II.

"For me, wild thoughts I dare not tell,
Desires that never cease;
For you, the calm, the angel's breast,
Whose dim foreknowledge is at rest;
For me, the beat of broken wings,
The old unanswered questionings."

do not live in a higher world day by day than we know of-we, upon whom the wearing worry of duty and strife, unassisted by the relief talent brings, tells in a gross and sordid sort of way.

At any rate, Ascot was so constituted that his great gift was an unfailing solace to him, a relaxation in all the stress of worldly storms, of which, however, thank the gods, few had as yet been suffered to beat upon his head. He had never known Neil, and one evening I took him to see my friends. It was a stormy night, had been a disagreeably wet and foggy day, and the bright room, made brighter by the sweet face of Mrs. Barras, seemed very attractive as we entered it.

"Neil was saying before you rang that 'Frank ought to come to-night,'" said Madge. "The day has been so uncomfortable, and we could not drive away a shiver of dissatisfaction when the wind blew the rain against the windows. We are comparing this weather with the sunshiny hours at Ellenwood, you see."

The remark was scarcely addressed to me alone, for the little woman included her husband and Harry in the comprehensive look and slow movement of her head.

"You are fond of the country, then?" Ascot said.

"Yes, fonder than I can ever be of the city. I cannot like the endless lines of streets, the pent up yards, the closely built houses. I wish always that I were a tree, a grand old oak tree, with great gnarled roots that would grow upward and outward and topple the houses over, and leave me an immensity of sunlight and sky and air.”

"There, there, my Wild Rose! You are showing how well you deserve my pet name. Your world is wide enough here for one small woman, and you should find it sufficiently hard to struggle with the faults of your big husband. But go now and sing to us, it will be like oil on the troubled waters of the storm; and who knows but that you might charm the stars out before the boys go again into the night."

"Boys' sounds well," I laughed. "That

might be reduced to the singular, one having seen nearly as many years of life as yourself."

"Sure enough, Frank, we are growing old, you and I, are we not? But Madge!"

she had been sitting very quietly, thinking apparently, while we talked—“but Madge! you will sing, will you not?"

66

Certainly"; and she rose to go to the piano, but turning quickly came back to Neil, and put one hand upon his shoulder.

"Yes, love, my world is wide; but never forget that it is you who make it so; you withdrawn, it would be so narrow that it would grow about and crush me." Then she went to the piano and began to sing : "The odor of pine trees blows spicily over,

The brooklet below me goes singing along. Across it, beyond, are the cows in the clover, And I o'er a letter am singing my song. "Letter, my letter, you're better, far better, Than gold-dust or jewels or sweet-scented wood. Ah, yes; it is true that I prize you, my letter, My letter that cheers me as nothing else could. "For here do I read, and believe it most truly,

There is love, there is faith in a great heart for

me;

And therefore my own heart is growing unruly,

And therefore the world is o'er-glorious to see.

"Then blow, spicy odors, around and above me,

And brooklet below me, sing loud and sing strong, For here do I read that a great heart does love me, And out of my soul bursts the joy of a song."

She lent to the words an intensity I had never known her to put into any song she had sung in my hearing. I do not know why everything that occurred that night seemed unusual to me. The plain, trailing black silk that Mrs. Barras wore, and the amber ornaments about her neck and in her hair, were strange to my eyes. The air of the room was such as that which accompanies a thunder-storm, filled, as it were, with electricity. Neil's usually alert figure was limp and unstrung; he lounged like a tired-out man, with an irresoluteness in his pose that I had never noticed before. And Harry's cheeks had a hectic flush and his eyes a brilliancy that I did not like. The boy-he was only twenty; remember this through the

story wherein his young life has a partwent over to Madge, who had risen and stood by the mantel.

"How can I thank you, Mrs. Barras? I have no words in which to do so, but "and he looked eagerly into her face you go into the country with me?"

"will

up to Harry, looked at him for a moment, and then lifting him in his strong arms, brought him, as he might have brought a baby, over to the sofa.

"Rest, young man; having created a bit of summer for us in the midst of autumn, you have done enough. How, how can a

"Yes. Ah, I had forgotten that I am a stranger to you!" And he seated himself at the piano. They had never heard him play, and, as I afterwards knew, were not aware that he was the young musician who had won his laurels at Berlin and London while they, too, were in Europe.

For a minute his fingers trembled lightly on the keys of the piano, then- The early morning birds were chirping and twittering in the trees; the dew fell now and then in infrequent drops upon the grass from the wet branches; the flowers, one would have thought, lifted up their faces to the sun. Afar off the sea just murmured on the shore. Life began its stir for the day.

Then he took us down to a brook that flowed slowly along over the pebbles in its bed. The mowers sharpened their scythes and cut the grain in the meadows. And after, a storm rose up in the distance; it came rapidly over the land; thunder and lightning and swift sheets of rain hushed all the other sounds of nature.

The storm passed over; one by one the birds began again to sing; the reapers were at work once more; the brook rippled with a stronger, fuller sound than it had done; the heavy drops fell from the shrubbery. And then, off in a far field, a farmer sang as he came across the meadows from the barn. The song died away, and the hands of the improvisator rested motionless on the instru

ment.

Did you dream then, laddie, that you had played the gamut of your life? the sunshine, the song, the storm, and the peace and beauty after the tempest? Nay, it could not have been given you to see, but yet you would play no more that evening.

"My dear Mr. Barras, there is surely nothing wonderful in such a bit of improvisation as that. Think for a while of all that the dead and gone masters of my art have brought forth from instruments like this! There is everything, everything that may be expressed in poetry, in painting, concealed among the keys and wires of a piano, and it needs only the right hand to find and bring forth the melodies to the world. You remember Buonarotti said that every block of marble held the slumbering statue; one had but to find it and free it from the stone. So with music, it is all there in that wooden case, and my poor hands find but a small part of it after all."

"Nevertheless," said Madge, "you have given us a great pleasure, a great surprise; for I had not supposed one could so control my imagination by the ear as to lead me into distant places and-"

"By the ear, love," interrupted the incorrigible Neil. "I have lead you by the ear a great many times, and shall proceed to do so in the presence of 'all these here assembled' if you do not leave the mantle and that crackling fire and be seated."

We had a few games of cards after that, drank a glass of wine apiece, and ate a bit of cake, for it was a fancy Neil had that all friends who came to see him must "break bread," as he called it, with him under his roof. And then Harry and I went from the bright room into the darkness of the street, where the yellow gas-light flared, and here and there overhead the white cold stars were slowly coming out in the sky, from which the clouds rolled heavily down into the hori

zon.

As we crossed the Public Gardens, Ascot stopped, standing still to inhale the air with