t as there is no history in the world like Poland's. Your poor
friend knows them all--has known them all from his childhood. They will
speak to him of his torn country. He will hear in them the cry of the
White Eagle--the White Eagle of Poland--as she soars wounded and
bleeding over the southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and
forests of Lithuania. It is in these songs that we Poles listen to the
very heart-beats of our outraged country. Our songs--our music--our
poets--our memories:--as a nation that is all we have--except the faith
in us that never dies. _Hinc surrectura!_ Yes, she shall rise again, our
Poland! Our hope is in God, and in the human heart, the human
conscience, that He has made. Comfort your friend. He has lost much,
poor boy!--but he has still ears to hear, a brain, an imagination to
conceive. Let him work still for music and for Poland--they will some
day reward him!"

And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into
fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series
of variations on the lovely theme of the "Heynal"--that traditional
horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of
Panna Marya--of which Otto had spoken to Falloden.

But all these things were as yet hidden from Otto. Falloden and
Constance corresponded about them, in letters that anybody might have
read, which had behind them, nevertheless, a secret and growing force of
emotion. Even Mrs. Mulholland, who was rapidly endearing herself both to
Constance and Radowitz, could only guess at what was going on, and when
she did guess, held her tongue. But her relations with Falloden, which
at the beginning of his residence in the cottage had been of the
coldest, gradually became less strained. To his own astonishment, he
found the advice of this brusque elderly woman so important to him that
he looked eagerly for her coming, and obeyed her with a docility which
amazed himself and her. The advice concerned, of course, merely the
small matters of daily life bearing on Otto's health and comfort, and
when the business was done, Falloden disappeared.

But strangely amenable, and even humble as he might appear in these
affairs to those who remembered his haughty days in college, for both
Constance and Mrs. Mulholland quite another fact emerged from their
experience of the cottage household during these weeks:--simply
this--that whatever other people might do or be, Fallode