Volume 5 — Original. Verheyden's Right Hand.

If there were no music, I think there would have been no Verheyden. He was an obligato.

The child of a violin-player and a singer, both professional, he had been born into an atmosphere of sweet sounds. His baby eyelids had drooped in slumber to a flute-voice lullaby, or some ethereal strain from his father's precious little Cremona. Every breeze that swept over the rippling Neckar or down the wooded mountain-sides, playing mournfully through the wind-harp in the window, caught the child at his play, hushing him. As soon as he could reach them, his fingers sought the keys of the piano; and from that thrilling moment when first a musical sound woke at his touch, Verheyden had found his occupation. It became his life. Every feeling found expression at the tips of his fingers, and his fiercest passions culminated in a discord.

It is said that a violin long played upon will show in the wood flutings worn by the "continual dropping" of musical sounds from the strings. So Verheyden seemed wrought upon by his art. He looked like a man who might have stepped from some wild German tale; of Walpurgis, or other. He was called tall, being slight, and appeared to be made of nerves and as little as possible besides. His dark hair rose like the hair in Sir Godfrey Kneller's portraits, and streamed back from his forehead as if blown. His thin face was alive with restless gray eyes—the eyes of a listener, not a seer—with fiery nostrils to the slightly aquiline nose, and with an unsteady mouth. He had frequent flitting motions, apparently inconsequent, really timed to some tune in his mind. He was moody, absent, abrupt; he was too much in earnest about everything. He had little perception of wit or humor, and he never laughed except with delight. He could be bold, yet he was simple and ingenuous as a child. An enthusiast, with room in his narrow, intense brain for but one idea at a time; a man who would take life by the blade rather than the handle; a man in alto relievo.

On the breath of some unaccountable impulse, he would have said—fulfilling his destiny, say we—Verheyden came to the New World, wandered about a little, dazed and homesick, at length engaged to take the place of Laurie, the organist, who was about going to Europe for further instruction.

He went into the church one afternoon with Laurie to try the organ. A sultry afternoon it was, the eve of the Assumption; but inside the church all was coolness and silence and shadow, most home-like to the stranger of any place he had seen this side the ocean. While the organist played, be leaned from the choir and looked down into the nave. Laurie played with great sweetness and delicacy, and chose first one of those yearning things that touch, but do not rouse; and Verheyden leaned and listened, dreaming himself at home.

Ah! the green, cool Neckar flowing downward to the Rhine; all the rafts and all the barges, all the wet and mossy rock; the overlooking mountains dense with forests to their summits; the gray outstanding castle crumbling lothly from its post; the red roofs of the houses, the churches fair and many; all the quiet and the color of that home in fatherland.

When the organist ceased playing, the dreamer felt as though he had been in motion and were suddenly stopped. He perceived that he was waving his hand, and became aware of a little maiden dressed in white who had been going about placing flowers, and who, at the first sound of music, had sunk upon the altar-steps, and sat there listening, her eyes upturned and fixed on the crucifix.

"Who, then, is she?" asked Verheyden, as Laurie trifled with the keys, holding the clew while he searched what next to play.

Laurie glanced into the mirror before him. "Oh! she belongs in a frame on the wall, but sometimes steps out and wanders about the church. She sings at service. Call her up here if you can."

Verheyden hastily took a seat at the organ, and, as the girl rose and prepared to leave the church, a smooth strain sprang like a lasso from under his fingers, and caught her. She went upstairs, and, standing by the organist, sang Lambillot's Quam Dilecta. Her voice was not powerful, but a pure soprano, clear and sweet, making up in earnestness what it lacked in volume. She sang with exquisite finish, having taken the kernel of science and thrown away the husk. Musical ornamentation was not with Alice Rothsay vocal gymnastics, but seemed to grow upon the melody as spontaneously as tendrils upon the vine. Verheyden laughed with delight when, at the climax of the song, she touched the silver C in alt.

What had been a little maiden in the distance was a small young woman when near by. She was blonde; her oval face had the lustrous paleness of a pearl; she looked as she sang, pure, sweet, and earnest. One knowing the signs in faces would say that sharp tools must have wrought there to make the eyelids and the mouth so steady. Strangers called her cold; but those who had once seen her pale gray eyes grow luminous thought her fervid.

Then began again Verheyden's life, growing richer everyday. Musical cognoscenti grew enthusiastic about him: he was a genius, they said, no one before had so well interpreted the old masterpieces of song. Laurie was charming; but Verheyden was inspiring. The Scottish laddie was sweet and bright as one of his own dancing burns; but the German brought reminiscences of torrents and avalanches, and lightnings tangled among the mountain-tops. Laurie saw music as in a glass darkly, and strove to tell them how she looked; but Verheyden grasped the goddess with compelling fingers, and led her out before their eyes to dazzle them. His slight form below the towering organ-pipes they compared to Samson between the pillars of the temple of Gaza.

Verheyden was extremely happy in his art: pleased, too, to feel the wreath of fame settling on his brow with tingling touches; and when that August day had slipped back three years, he was thirty years old.

John Maynard, the machinist, drew into his mind various abortive notions conceived by men who had lived, or who were still in the sun—drew them in mistrustfully, and found them stray sparks of genius whose kindred dwelt with him. Uniting, they played pranks on the man; they made his brain swell and snap as they pushed open the portals of unsuspected chambers; they sailed through his dreams in the trains of vast shadows, whose shapes he panted to catch as they eluded him in the labyrinths of sleep; they grouped and they scattered, forming here and there a salient or receding angle, leaving voids to be filled; they got into his eyes till he forgot his friends and to brush his hat; they salted his coffee and sugared his beef; they took him on long rambles, where he would wake to find himself standing stock-still, staring at nothing; they burned up questions and answers before they could reach his lips, and they dislocated his sentences. They wooed, and eluded, and tormented, and enraptured him, till, darting on them unawares, he caught a shadow and copied it out on paper. Finally, fused into one shape, it sprang from his brain, like Minerva from Jove's, armed cap-à-pie. The machinist's invention was clad in iron, and stood shining and winking in the unaccustomed sunshine for everybody to admire.

Which finishes the story of John Maynard's only love.

Among the many visitors who flocked to see this wonderful invention came one day Verheyden, Alice Rothsay, and her cousin Rose.

They stood and watched smoothly slipping cylinders that coquetted with a hand of gold from every gazing window, large wheels that turned deliberately on their dizzy centres, and little families of cogged wheels that made them feel cross-eyed—all the deceitful gentleness and guileful glitter of the creature.

Alice Rothsay stretched a venturesome pink finger-tip toward a lazily rocking bar, then with a shiver, drew it back. "But I like to look at machinery," she said; "it is so self-possessed. Besides, it is full of curves, which are amiable as well as graceful. Parallels are unsocial, and angles are disagreeable."

"Parallels are faithful if not fond," remarked the machinist, "and straight lines have an aim and arrive at places. They are the honest lines, the working lines, the strong lines. The reasoner's thought goes like an arrow, the dreamer's like smoke on a heavy day. I would rather see a cat pounce upon a mouse than run round after her own tail."

"But the spiral," she ventured.

"Oh! that's the supernatural," said the machinist.

"For my part," said Rose, "I don't see why the cat, after having caught her mouse, should not amuse herself by running round after her own tail. It keeps her out of the cream."

Miss Rothsay turned to look at Verheyden, who was examining another part of the machine. As she looked, he stretched his right hand to point a question, and stretched it too far. The cruel teeth caught it, there was a sharp breath that was not quite a cry. John Maynard sprang to stop the machine, and in a moment Verheyden drew back, wild-eyed, but silent, holding up a crushed and bleeding hand.

"There is no pain," he said as Maynard knotted the handkerchief about his arm. But he staggered while speaking, and the next moment fell.

Miss Rothsay had news of him that evening. His hand had been amputated, and he was wild. He wanted to tear the ligatures from his arm and bleed to death, had to be restrained and drugged into quiet. Her messenger had left him in a morphia-sleep, pale as the dead, and with only the faintest breathing.

Weeks passed, and the reports were scarcely more cheering. The patient had to be watched lest be should do himself harm; and as he resented such watching with savage impatience, his attendant's place was no sinecure.

Indeed, Verheyden writhed in his circumstances as upon burning fagots. Wrapped in his art as in an atmosphere, the wrench that tore his hand away left him breathless. Music, the glory and the sweetness of his life, floated back only just out of reach, tantalizing him with remembered and almost possible bliss. Melodies brushed his lips and left a sting; chords stretched broad, golden, electric, and, reaching to grasp them, he fell into darkness. His passionate heart rose and swelled, and found no outlet, but beat and broke against an impossibility, like the sea on its rocks. Verheyden's occupation was gone.

True, he could study phenomena. He was haunted by the ghost of a hand that he could clench but could not see, that sometimes itched at the finger-tips. It would seem that the nerves, confounded at being cut short from their usual station, had not yet learned to send new messages, even sent the old ones blunderingly, overdoing in their anxiety to do the best they could. He had sometimes to recollect that this troublesome hand was preserved in spirits in a glass jar set in Dr. Herne's laboratory, on a shelf just behind his pet skeleton.

Verheyden read treatises on nerves till his own were no longer telegraphic lines under control, but the wires of a rack to which he was bound. He studied spiritualism till in dim night-watches the veil before the unseen seemed to glide back. He dived into mesmerism till all the powers of his mind centred in a will that glittered hard and bright in his eyes, causing the timid to shrink and the pugilistic to make fists.

But through all these noxious parasites of the tree of knowledge which he recklessly gathered about him moaned ceaselessly his unforgotten bereavement. Or, if he forgot for a moment, it was like drawing the knife from a wound to drive it back again.

Having exhausted every other distraction, he started one day for a long walk in the country. He could not walk the city streets without meeting at every step some piercing reminder of his loss. It was Scylla and Charybdis. His fancy had caught a spark from everything beautiful in nature, and there was not an outline nor motion, not a sound nor a tint, but found in him some echo. Stately, swaying trees in his path waved the grave movement of an Andante; the shrill little bird that slid down on a sunbeam through the branches mimicked a twittering strain of Rossini's; a sigh of air that rose, and swelled, and sank again, echoed a phrase of Beethoven; and an unseen rivulet played one of Chopin's murmuring soliloquies.

Verheyden trod savagely on yielding moss, and crackling twigs, and dry leaves of last year, and on the bluest of blue violets that bloomed bathed in the noon sunshine. He plunged into a by-path, and came to a brook that fled as though pursued. It stumbled dizzily over shining pebbles, glided with suspended breath around grassy curves; it was all a-tremble with inextricably tangled sunshine and shadow; it gushed here and there into sweet complaining; it leaped with white feet down the rocks. Verheyden threw himself upon the bank beside it. He had played such dances, measures that made the dancers giddy, and sent the ladies dazed and laughing to their seats.

"Does he think we are dervishes? Do take me into the air."

Verheyden laughed; and the fingers in Dr. Herne's glass jar behind the skeleton played a caprice as saucy as Puck plunging with headlong somersaults and alighting on tiptoe. Then, with a groan, he recollected.

As he crouched there, half wishing the water were deep enough to drown him, be heard a low-voiced singing near by, and, taking a step presently, he saw a picture among the pine shadows. Alice Rothsay, with a red rose in her bosom, sat in the moss, and the green, thready grasses, looking fair as Titania, her small figure showing smaller by the boles and branches of the trees. She was hushing herself silent and smiling, her lucent eyes intent on a humming-bird that wandered in the flickering shade and shine of the woods. It foraged for a moment among the shrinking blossoms, the bold little robber! it snapped at a round bright drop dashed up by the fretted waters, and got a sip, half spray, half sunshine, that turned it clean tipsy; then it made a dart at the red rose in Alice Rothsay's bosom, and hung there, a little blue buzz with a long bill. The rose trembled over the girl's suppressed laughter, and the winged mite flung itself petulantly breast deep in the fragrant petals. Then it reeled away, scared at the bound her heart gave; for, looking up, she saw Verheyden. It was the first time they had met since his accident.

"I dare not pity you," she said; "the hand of God shows too plainly." But the moistened eyes, and the unsteadiness of her soft, loitering voice, contradicted the words she spoke.

He looked at her in a dazed, lost way, wondering who then might be deserving of pity.

"We miss you at church," she went on. "We have a different organist every Sunday, and I am not used to their accompaniments. I broke down last Sunday. Mrs. Wilder played, and at the sucipe that you always played legato, she threw in half a dozen bars of explosives. The 'deprecationem' was fired off, every syllable of it, as from a mortar. I jumped as if I'd been blown up. So few know how to accompany. It will be better when Laurie comes. But we want to see you at church, Verheyden."

His face lost its momentary gentleness. "I don't go to church now," he said; "that is, to what we call church. I've been invoking 'black spirits and white, blue spirits and gray'—all but the white. I've been calling back the soul of Mesmer. I could tell stories that would frighten you."

"Oh! no, you couldn't," she said. "'If armies in camp should stand together against me, my heart shall not fear.' I might fear for you, though. I have reason to fear for you when you give thought to such delusions."

Verheyden began defending himself with the impatience of one who knows his position to be weak, going over that hackneyed talk about progress and freedom of thought. "Ah!" she sighed, "there are heights and heights; and Babel is not Pisgah."

The fragment of woods in which they had been walking belonged to the estate of Monsieur Leon, at whose house Alice was visiting; and, as she saw the two approaching, madame herself came out to meet them. An amiable, worldly woman, a patroness of the arts, graceful, cordial, and full of charming little enthusiasms. Not least among her aesthetic devotions was that to the toilette, by the help of which she managed to appear forty instead or sixty.

She stepped to meet Verheyden with both her hands extended, tears swimming in her fine dusky eyes. "My dear friend!" she said. "At last you remember us. You are welcome. Where have you been all summer?"

"Summer?" repeated Verheyden. "I haven't seen any summer."

And truly the three months had for him been beautiful in vain. He had not seen their glad, pelting showers, their dim, soft rains, nor the glory of their sunshine, and their moonlights had been to him as spilt wine.

He could not help being soothed by these friends. There was no obtrusive sympathy, no condolence hard to answer to, no affected reserve concerning his affliction. He was free to speak of it or not, as he should choose. They went on with some trifling employment while they talked to him; or, if silent, he felt their kindly, homelike presence. Then the large, cool house was refreshing after the dust and heat of the city.

Silence was sweetest in that sultry noon; and, presently perceiving it, they did not speak. But the oaks outside rustled like oaks of Dodona, and what had seemed silence grew to be fullest sound. There was a stir of plants uneasy with growing, multitudinous tiny voices of insects in the grasses, bee and bird and the murmur of waters, the wings of doves that half flew, half dropped, in purple flocks from the eaves, the fall of an over-ripe peach, the shrill cicala, the fond sighing of the brooding air in whose bosom all these sounds nestled.

Alice rose to lower the crimson curtain over an intrusive sunbeam, (madame kept her crimson draperies up all summer, knowing that her complexion needed deep, warm lights,) and out of revenge the brightness poured through the tissue, its gold changed to a rosy fire. Pausing in that light to listen, she stood aglow, her pale-brown hair, her clear eyes, her white dress.

"It is a Guido!" whispered Verheyden, with a flash of light across his face.

"No," said madame; "it is the Charity for which Ruskin longed, floating all pink and beautiful down to earth, the clouds blushing as she passes."

The sun went lingeringly down the west, a breeze fluttered up from the south, and they roused themselves to open the windows.

A piano drew Verheyden by all his aching heart-strings. He seated himself before it and played the base of Rossini's Cujus Animam. As he played, a fair hand stole to the keys at his right and played the Aria.

"It kills me! Alice, it kills me!" he moaned out, turning his haggard face toward her.

"Verheyden," she said, "do something heroic: submit!"

"To writhe on the rack is not to resist," he said bitterly.

"But how sublime," she urged, "if, instead of writhing, one could, in the midst of pain, wear a serene face, and rejoice in a serene heart."

"It is easy for you to talk of serenity," he said impatiently. "You have all you want. You live in music as I lived in it. And what an enchanted life we lived together! Do you remember the first time I saw you? Three years ago, it was, on the eve of the Assumption. You sat on the steps of the altar and listened while Laurie played. I told him you looked like a soprano, and he said you were one, that you had a voice like a violin. Do you remember how I called you up?"

"Yes," she said, smiling at the remembrance. "No one ever accompanied like you. The voice went floating on your music like a shallop on the water. Your interludes were nothing more than spray or little wavelets, or like a half-hushed bubbling laughter underneath the bows."

"And you," he said, "you never learned: you sing of nature, and 'tis art that tries to reach you. Laurie always said your roulades were as if you couldn't help them; that he had to look at the score to be sure you didn't make them up as you went along. Come, now, let us try."

In the act of turning eagerly to the piano, he recollected and stopped.

She touched his arm with an earnest hand. "Delight is dear," she said; "but never so dear as when we find it in dark places. Let me speak to you of myself, Verheyden, as I have never spoken to anyone else. You think my life has been a tranquil one, but you mistake. None, or but few, knowing, I have gone through tragedies that would delight a romance writer. What I read is dull to what I have experienced. If I am calm, it is because I have nothing left to suffer. At twenty-five—you didn't think me so old because I am small and blonde—at twenty five I have exhausted the pains of life. And, Verheyden, believe me, contradictory as it may sound, the highest rapture that earth can give is distilled from its sharpest pains. It is true, even here, that those who weep are blessed. When the strong man, Jesus, rends this ravenous nature of ours, after some days we find sweetness. O Verheyden! go to the Lord with your burden, and he will give you rest. Do not fill your soul with discord because your hand can no more awaken harmony. That loftier harmony nothing can disturb without your consent. Is it not beautiful to think of—the security of the soul? Remember, Verheyden, the lightnings may strike us, but our souls shall not be smitten; and they shall not be drowned though the waters cover us; the earth may burn, but our souls shall not be consumed; and they shall not be crushed though the heavens fall on us. When I think of these things, I laugh at fear of anything save sin; I am lifted; my body seems dissolving like frost in fire. I cannot comprehend the sadness of your face. I am glad! I am glad!"

He looked at her as she stood there pale and shining, then stretched his hand, and, at a venture, touched the scarf she wore. It didn't scorch him.

Monsieur Léon came home at sunset, and with him Auguste, the son of the house. Monsieur was one of his wife's enthusiasms. "He is a misanthrope," she would say delightedly. "What a listless air! he cares for nothing. How mournful and hopeless his eyes! And though his hair is white, he is but little over fifty. He is full of poetry and sublimity and learning; but it is frozen in. His early days were unfortunate—a poor gentleman, you know—and all his life till he was forty was a struggle for bread. At forty be inherited his property. Then he thought to live, my poor Auguste! We went to Paris, which we had left as children. Ah! well. But he had aspirations, and pressed on toward Italy. There was the Medean chaldron, he said. He was ill when we reached there, and saw nothing till one evening he was convalescent, and I took him by the hand and led him out on to our balcony. It was a May-moonlight in Venice. The earth can do nothing more. He stood and looked till I thought he had lost his breath, then clasped his hands over his heart as though he had a great pang, and cried out, 'O my lost youth!' He would look no more. He went in and sat with his face hidden in his hands. It was too late. The next day we started and came back. He looked at nothing as we passed, but sat in the gondola or carriage with his face hidden. He said it was like setting a feast before the corpse of a man who had died of starvation. So romantic!" sighs madame, smoothing the lace ruffles from her little hands.

Presently, when evening deepened, Auguste put his head in at the window and called them out to see an eclipse of Venus.

They stood in the dewy dusk and fragrance of the garden, and watched the star hover, moth-like, near and nearer to the moon, seeming to grow larger and more brilliant as it approached extinction, shining in audacious beauty. Then it touched, trembled, and disappeared.

"Served her right!" cried Auguste, fresh from the classics.

"But, Alice, where is Verheyden?" asked madame.

"He recollected Laurie's concert, and would go. I tried to detain him, but could not."

Verheyden hurried into town to the concert-hall, though by no means certain he might not be tempted to fling himself over the balcony. Avoiding acquaintances, he took a seat high up and apart, and looked down upon the audience. Such crowds had flocked to hear him in that lost life of his. Was it indeed lost, or did he dream?

Presently there was music. There came his fugues rolling in like overlapping billows. How he had played them when his mood had been to plunge in such a surge, he solitary, everything else washed away like sea-weed! He would never breast that tide again! Symphonies sailed over his head; but he could no more reach to touch their pinions. There was one he had named St. Michael's, from a sharp brightness that swung through it, sword-like. How he had wrestled with those angels!

Then Laurie, being loudly called, stood out, blushing before their praises.

Bless the boy! Only that day, bursting into tears, he had clasped Verheyden around the neck, saying: "Dear friend, my success hurts me like failure when I think of you."

To an encore he played "Comin' through the Rye," improvising variations in which the lovely melody hovered like Undine in the fountain, half veiled in that spray of music: an arch, enchanting thing.

As Laurie stood up again, his friend leaned over the balcony and looked down on the young, lifted brow. For one instant their eyes met; then Verheyden started up and fled out into the night.

Father Vinton sat alone in his room meditating on a text which was gradually expanding, budding, and blossoming into a sermon. He tried not to be vexed when some one knocked at his door at that late hour, and was just controlling his voice to give a charitable summons when the door opened, and Verheyden, or his ghost, came in, and, without a word of greeting, fell on his knees beside the priest, dropping his face to the arm of the chair.

"My poor friend," said the father, "have you not yet forgiven God for loving you better than you can understand?"

Verheyden shivered, but said nothing.

"Remember whose hands were pierced, not one, but both, and his feet, and his side. He never shrank."

Verheyden's shaking hand held out a little vial "I shall take this unless you prevent me," he said. "Help me if there is any help. I dare not be alone."

Father Vinton unstopped the vial, and, taking deliberate aim, flung it through the open window into the street. Then he laid his hand tenderly upon the bowed head. "You shall not be alone," he said. "Stay here to-night."

Blessed are all peace-makers; but thrice blessed are those who make peace between the soul and God. Blessed are they in whose care we breathe the tales else unspoken, whose hands lead us back from the brink of many a precipice where no one dreamed we stood, whose voices soothe the pains hidden to all besides, and inspire with hope hearts that were filled with despair. May such peace-makers be for ever blessed!

Verheyden's religion had been a recollection rather than a remembrance. He had made a point of going to confession and communion once a year; and had one looked into his mind while he was preparing for these sacraments, something like the following might have been seen: "Well, what have I been doing this year? I haven't committed any sins. I've done nothing but play tunes. To be sure, I broke Smith's fiddle over his head for playing false and spoiling a chorus. Don't suppose that was just right; though I must say I think the chorus of more consequence than Smith's head. But I must have done something. I'm not a saint yet. Guess I'll say a prayer.

"Oh! I remember!—; that was mean. I wouldn't believe I could do such a thing if I didn't know I had. I'll be hanged if I do it again. Then there's—, and—, and—. Well, confession does put a fellow out of conceit with himself. And there's—; a dishonest deed, I must own. I don't wonder the Lord gets angry with us; and how he does wait for us to come round! I'm glad I didn't drop dead to-day. I'm thankful I didn't drop dead to-day! The Lord is good. What am I lounging on a seat for? Why don't I go on my knees? Then there's ——. I'm sorry for that. I wish somebody would give me a thrashing for it. I've been sorry for the same sin dozens of times, and accused myself of it, and promised not to commit it again. My resolutions are not worth much. Suppose I can't keep myself out of sin without the Lord's help. I'll ask for it."

At the end, Verheyden, sobered and humbled, would present himself to the priest and make a clear and sincere confession.

But now religion was to be no more an incident, but the business of his life. He was fortunate in his director, for Father Vinton was not only prudent, but sympathetic. If, when he read lives of the saints, Verheyden longed for ecstasies which should thrill him as sensibly as music could, the father did not reprove his presumption, but said: "My son, such favors do not come when they are looked and asked for, they are unexpected. Strive to render yourself worthy of God's friendship, and forget the reward till he shall please to bestow it." If, kneeling before the altar, his eyes full of tears, the intensity of his gaze defeating itself, Verheyden fancied that the cross before him quivered with its burden, and that the aureoled head grew to be the head of a living, suffering man whose eyes turned pitifully on him—the father did not call his penitent crazy.

"Perhaps he grieves to find you so unreconciled," he said. "When with a loving violence he tore the idol from your grasp in order to give you a work wherein the end would not be forgotten in the means, he expected your submission. Perhaps he grieves to see that you reject all work."

Verheyden blushed painfully as he extended his mutilated arm. "What can I do?"

"Take charge of your singing-class again."

For one instant he faced the priest with a sudden fierceness, the last spark of rebellion in him. Then his face faded and drooped.

"I will, sir."

"Miss Rothsay will play for you when you need her."

"Yes, father."

And Verheyden went back to the drudgery of his profession, missing its delights, and did his duty faithfully if not cheerfully. There could have been no severer test.

There was no more talk of visions and trances. But every morning a shadow of a man stole into the chapel, knelt near the door, and went out as quietly after the mass was over. Once a fortnight the same shadow came to Father Vinton's side and made a sincere but disheartening confession. The spring of the musician's spirit was broken.

"You are ill," the priest said to him one day.

"No," answered Verheyden dreamily. "My heart troubles me a little. It beats too fast. There's nothing else the matter with me."

He was told that he ought to consult a doctor.

"I thought I would," was the answer; "but I forgot it. What is in the church?"

"Laurie with the choir practising a new mass. To-morrow is the Assumption, you know."

"Oh! yes, I'll go in and listen awhile; shall I?"

"My poor boy!" said the priest. "Will it not give you more pain than pleasure?"

"No, father, it doesn't hurt me now."

Going into the choir, Verheyden took a seat apart and unseen. He leaned wearily, closed his eyes and listened, hearing the voices more than the instrument, hearing one voice through all. When Alice Rothsay uplifted her pure voice and sang the Dona nobis pacem, tears dropped slowly down his face; but they were not tears of bitterness.

Presently all but Alice left the church. As on that day, four years before, when he had first seen her, she had flowers for the altars.

It was a delight for her to get into the church alone, as she now believed herself to be. If she were good, she knew not. No matter: God is good. She felt as though she were among dear friends with nobody by to criticise, Her delight bubbled up almost over the verge of reverence. But perfect love casteth away fear; and she loved.

"Rosa Mystica, here are roses. Pray for me. And lilies for St. Joseph, whom I often forget. He is so near you he is lost, like the morning-star in the morning. St. Paul, I bring you fine plumes, and cardinal flowers like living coals. But you look as though you would scorch them up with a push from the point of your pen, writing epistles toward the four winds. O Unseen One! what shall I offer you? The earth is yours, and the fulness thereof. I cannot offer myself, for I am not mine to give. But if you love me, take me. O Sweetness!"

Sunset flashed through the windows, and every saint caught an aureola. Then the day went out, bright and loth. When the sanctuary lamp began to show its flame in the gathering twilight, Alice Rothsay rose with a happy heart, and went home.

Verheyden was happy, too; he scarce knew why, perhaps because the happiness of another made his own seem possible. He groped his way down to the chapel, and found Father Vinton hearing confessions.

"God is with him," thought the priest when Verheyden had left him. "He is like a child."

The same child-like sweetness shone in the face raised the next morning for communion.

Going out of the chapel after his thanksgiving, Father Vinton saw his penitent still kneeling there. "I wished I had asked him to pray for me," he said. "I must see him when he comes out."

He waited half an hour, watching, but no one appeared. The father would not for anything disturb so sacred a devotion; but he felt like looking again. Going back: to the chapel, he saw the lonely worshipper still in place, but in a slightly changed attitude. He was leaning a little wearily on the desk before him, and his shoulder and head rested against a pillar beside. His pale face was lifted, as though some one above had spoken, and he had looked up to answer.

Father Vinton hesitated, then went nearer. A morning sunbeam came in through an eastern window, stole in tender, tremulous gold over the musician's hair and brow, and looked into his eyes. So Magdalene might have looked into the sepulchre. The father bent and looked also.

Ah, Verheyden! Some One above had spoken, and he had answered.