sick man, there was no one in the garden save the fiddler himself.
Once or twice a lad appeared on the top of the wall, looking over, but
vanished at once when he saw Charley's face at the window. Long ere the
baker had finished, the song was caught up from outside, and before the
last notes of the violin had died away, twenty voices were singing it in
the street, and forty feet marched away with it into the dusk.

Darkness comes quickly in this land of brief twilight. Presently out
of the soft shadowed stillness, broken by the note of a vagrant
whippoorwill, crept out from Maximilian Cour's old violin the music of
'The Baffled Quest of Love'.

The baker was not a great musician, but he had a talent, a rare gift of
pathos, and an imagination untrammelled by rigorous rules of harmony and
construction. Whatever there was in his sentimental bosom he poured
into this one achievement of his life. It brought tears to the eyes of
Narcisse Dauphin. It opened a gate of the garden wall, and drew inside a
girl's face, shining with feeling.

Maximilian Cour spoke for more than himself that night. His philandering
spirit had, at middle age, begotten a desire to house itself in a quiet
place, where the blinds could be drawn close, and the room of life made
ready with all the furniture of love. So he had spoken to his violin,
and it had answered as it had never done before. The soul of the lean
baker touched the heart of a man whose life had been but a baffled
quest, and the spirit of a girl whose love was her sun by day, her moon
by night, and the starlight of her dreams.

From the shade of the window the man the girl loved watched her as she
sank upon the ground and clasped her hands before her in abandonment to
the music. He watched her when the baker, at last, overcome by his
own feelings--and ashamed of them--got up and stole swiftly out of the
garden. He watched her till he saw her drop her face in her hands; then,
opening the door and stealing out, he came and laid a hand upon her
shoulder, and she heard him say:

"Rosalie!"

CHAPTER XXXVI. BARRIERS SWEPT AWAY

Rosalie came to her feet, gasping with pleasure. She had been unhappy
ever since she had returned from Quebec, for though she had sometimes
been brought in contact with Charley in the Notary's house since the
day of the operation, nothing had passed between them save the necessary
commonplaces of a sick-room, given a little extra colour, perhaps,
by the s