? I really think he
does these things on purpose."

Brantome poised his hands above the keyboard, leaned forward to peer at
a legend scrawled faintly in the corner of the page, then, turning
round on the piano bench, cast at Lilla:

"Rose-covered Cypresses."

"What?" she exclaimed, with a start.

"He has called it that."

The old Frenchman began to play.

Not a song after all, but a piano concerto, it described in tone that
goal of all human longings, the conquest of tragedy.

But this music, although gradually made replete with victory, was not
to end in major chords of triumph. The sadness that seemed, at the
beginning, unassuageable, continued to the end, but--and herein lay the
victory--became ever more exquisite. For this was the utterance of a
man who having had his life transformed by love must soon leave that
love behind him; this glory that had descended upon his sadness was
such a glory as fills the sky for a little while before the inrush of
dusk. At the conclusion, it was as if in the gorgeousness of a sunset
the roses covering the cypresses had become a mist of rare hues, behind
which those trees emblematic of mourning almost lost their
significance. At last, however, one felt that the light was fading,
that the somber silhouettes of the cypresses were more visible than
their poetic embellishment. And finally, with the darkness, a breeze
seemed to bring a long sigh from those elegiac branches, together with
a perfume of the roses that had become unapparent, wet with dew as if
with innumerable tears.

After a long silence, Brantome lifted his burly, old body from the
piano bench, came to stand before David, then abruptly turned away.

"It is all your promises fulfilled," he said, as he went out of the
room without looking back. But it was Lilla whose arm he touched in
passing.

David Verne sat gazing before him, his sunken eyes shining in his face
of a sick, young Apollo in bronze. But soon, turning his eyes toward
Lilla:

"All you!"

She gathered his hands against her bosom with a movement that imparted
to him the life so violently pounding in her heart--the pride and the
hope, perhaps even a little of the defiance and belief. She gave him a
look that pierced the caverns of his brain, where his faith in death
resided blackly, with a white-hot faith in life.

"Have you forgotten," she breathed, "that a little while ago you, and
every one else, would have called this impossible?"