that quiet interior light that rested softly. upon the decorous portraits of his forebears, the mahogany, and the accumulated bric-à-brac of three generations, he became aware of the incongruous presence of Stella. He realized again her clean-cut, finished daintiness, the incisiveness of voice and feature. As he released her hand, still aware of its hard, boyish grip, he heard his aunt's voice, light, wandering, nonarresting, as if continuing some conversational thread, "And Miss Allison Clyde, Mark-my old friend." He had been vaguely aware of some one else in the room, but when he met the smile of the older. woman who held out her hand to him, he wondered that he had not realized it more promptly; for Miss Allison Clyde, although far removed from the youth of years, had about her something immediately and quietly charming-something, it, occurred to him, that suggested autumnal perfumes and the warmth of late sunlight. It was a face with a certain fine austerity belonging to a generation at once. more natural and more reserved than ours. "So this is Mary's boy," she said. "You have her eyes." He looked at her and unconsciously glanced at Stella. The older woman belonged to the quiet old room. Stella, despite the same inheritance, did not. Tea was brought in by a maid grown gray in his aunt's service, and Miss Lucretia presided. Mark's eyes again wandered from Miss Allison Clyde to Stella with involuntary comparison. No one would have accused Stella of not being a well-bred young woman, yet she sat, Mark noted, carelessly and not quite gracefully. Miss Allison Clyde was taller than Stella, yet she was adjusted to her chair with a disciplined grace and dignity far removed from stiffness. "Stella has promised to sing 'Crabbed Age' for me again," she announced when tea was finished. "Shall I sing it now?" Stella rose with her promptness, and, going to the piano, plunged at once into the opening bars. Although the composer was not an egoist, he shuddered. "I am making frightful hash of it, I know," Stella confessed, unabashed, as her fingers stumbled. "I think Miss Allison had better play it." Mark glanced quickly at the older woman. "Then it was you I heard a moment ago." "I tried it," she admitted, with a smile. "The title had a melancholy attraction for me. I had no idea the composer was overhearing, or I should have had stagefright dreadfully." "Play something else," Mark suggested. "It would give me so much pleasure. Something not Mark Faraday." Miss Allison rose decisively. "No, I will play 'Crabbed Age,'" she decided, "and youth shall sing it." And then they ran through it together, the older woman playing it with a musician's sense of its qualities, and Stella singing it through passably in her firm young voice. In answer to Mark's sincere, "Play more," as she started to rise from the piano stool, Miss Allison let her fingers wander through passages of "Meistersinger" in a way that showed a musician's knowledge of the score. "How wonderful that you can play like that still!" exclaimed Stella. The gaucherie of that "still" struck upon Mark's artistic sensibilities, trained in Italian habits of speech. "What a resource it must be!" "For crabbed age," Miss Allison finished. Her smile held a faint amusement. Stella, momentarily silenced, if not abashed, by this explicit voicing of her thought, did not contradict, and Miss Allison continued, "The technic of a Paderewski would be small compensation for lost youth, I fear." She said it without sentimentality, but, as she spoke, lightly touched the delicate theme of the "Golden Apples" that brought eternal youth to the gods, passing into the sublimity of the Valhalla motive. Looking up, she met Mark's comprehension and smiled, then, bringing her chord to a resolution, rose from the piano-stool. Mark watched her as she paused to turn over the pages of his "Sun-dial," noting the titles-Sunrise, Morning, High Noon, Afternoon, Evening, Night. " "Youth and Crabbed Age' is Evening, I see," she commented. "Then what is this?" She held up a separate sheet loosely set in the book, reading the title, "Too Late for Love and Loving." "That was an attempt with words of my own before I resigned in favor of Shakspere," Mark explained. "I am not a poet. They are just words for music." She read them over: "Sweet love, too late! Death stands at the gate." She sat down again without comment, and ran it through softly, then again more assuredly, with appreciation. The warm afternoon light from the open window fell upon her, revealing what the years had worn, what they had been powerless to touch. Her hair was half gray; but her eyes were as dark, vivid, and expectant as the eyes of youth-autumn pools shot through with the sun. The mouth was a generous one, finely molded by the experience of the years. He remembered that she was a spinster, yet there was about her none of the emptiness, the starved quality, of the woman with her destiny unfulfilled; nothing of the futility, the incompletion, of the celibate that causes the imagination to turn with relief to contemplation of the most bovine mother of a family. It must have been an impervious boor indeed who would venture to jest upon Miss Allison's single state. It spoke of naught but dignity. Life, it would seem, had not deprived her. It was that warm, alive, expectant quality, Mark reflected, that revealed that Allison Clyde was neither wife nor mother. She had turned, no doubt, to other interests with her unquenchable vividness, and so could still look out upon the world with young, hopeful eyes. Yet what, at her age, could the years still bring her? It had been surely a vain waiting; yet, viewed as a picture, it had, he felt, an autumnal beauty of its own. That night Miss Allison Clyde wrote a long letter to her lifelong friend, Miss Augusta Penfield: I met Lucretia's nephew, Mary's boy, to-day. He is, you know, a composer already on the road to fame. You remember that he was born abroad. There is for all his undiluted American ancestry a foreign touch about him, a something warm and ardent caught under the Italian skies that even our children seem to take on when born there. He is indeed a beautiful boy, a dreamer, yet manly. A boy I call him, yet he is twenty-nine. My dear father had four sons and a daughter at his age. Still he is a boy. It is strange in this generation, Augusta, that though in many ways they seem so advanced, so beyond us, in others they are further away from life's responsibilities than we were at their age. There is a suggestion of his Uncle William about Mark, but he is somehow stronger, more imperative. I was drawn to him at once because of his music. And he has the charming manner, the almost excessive chivalry, toward our sex that we see so little of any more, or at least seldom encounter at our age. Lucretia had asked Stella in for tea. She is a dear child and quite alarmingly composed, but not altogether musical, despite her excellent musical opportunities. She played one of the boy's songs, a delicious thing, rather dreadfully. I felt sorry for him. Lucretia insisted upon my playing his "Youth and Crabbed Age," which every one has been singing, although he seems delightfully unaware of that fact. He was so courteous about insisting that I should play more, I ran through a bit of "Meistersinger," he seemed so truly a young Walther, and then discovered another little song that he has not published, "Too Late for Love and Loving," full of a kind of pathos that it seems impossible youth could understand. But I suppose that is where genius comes in. The rest of the letter was made of mes sages and the mild, small daily occurrences that are of moment to such as Miss Augusta Penfield. That night, searching in an old secretary in his room for some missing notes, Mark came upon a little daguerreotype in a drawer. It was of a young girl, taken apparently in the late sixties or early seventies. Something in the face, clear-eyed, warm-lipped, trusting, caught and held his attention. He turned it over to see if the girl's name was on the back, but the only inscription was a date in his Uncle William's writing, June, 1863. Poor Uncle William, who had been so full of promise, they said, but who had died from a bullet wound, a sacrifice to his country two years after the war! Some girl that his uncle had loved, perhaps. The young man's face, dark-eyed, romantic, familiar to him through the old picture in uniform always on his mother's dressing-table, rose before his mind's eye. Perhaps Uncle William had taken the little picture away with him to the war. The date must have been just about the time that he had enlisted and marched away. He had gone without telling her perhaps; she could have been little more than a child. Perhaps he had never told. Or they might have had their brief tragic happiness upon the edge of death, they two "embracing under death's spread hand." He stared at the picture. It would have, been easy to love a girl with those eyes, that mouth. A fancy came upon him to put Uncle William's picture beside the girl's, and impulsively he went back to the darkened drawing-room, groped for the framed picture that stood upon the mantel, found it, and carried it up to his room. Then side by side he studied the two faces. His imagination began to reconstruct their story. He wished that he might learn more. He went back to the old desk. It might have been his uncle's. He opened a drawer; it was empty. A second and a third; the last contained some valueless miscellany, an old glass knob, a faded bit of worsted fringe, some papers. Poking under them, he actually found a pack age of letters. He picked it up, and with a little thrill of realization recognized his uncle's writing. The paper was old and yellowed with time. It had no address, but was sealed with red wax. Scarcely expecting fulfilment of his romantic hope, he broke the seal and opened the package. There was no address on the first envelop. Some business memorandum, no doubt; yet nothing surely that at this late day he might not in honor examine. He drew out the closely written sheet and turned it over. After all the years his eyes were surely the first to read it. There was no name in the inscription. Uncle William's fine writing was very legible. II July 15, 1863. My little love with the smooth hair and the great eyes, you do not know that I have the little daguerreotype next my heart. I stole it from Lucretia, and packed it among my things. How often I shall take it out in the long days ahead before the war is over and I can come back to tell you that I love you. You will wait for me, sweetheart. No other man shall be the one to make those clear eyes fall, to change them from a child's to a woman's eyes. I can see you as you stood there beside the sun-dial. "Fight a brave fight, William," you said, "and come back soon." You were brave and glorious. Your eyes were not even wet, yet you care enough for me to shed a tear. I know that, little Allison. We have been such good comrades, you and I. I looked back and saw you waving. But you trust life so fearlessly, child. You are only fifteen. At that age one cannot imagine death. I am twenty-three and am a man. I knew I must not speak. I knew it, though my heart was knocking against my sides for love of you. So I shall not send these letters. I shall send you a line now and then, but not of love. You will hear the news of me from mother and the girls. I shall write these letters just the same, and keep them, and if the day comes when those great eyes, those dear and wonderful eyes, give the promise my heart is |