ks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily
call at the gaily painted ranch house, he found Katharine laughing like
a schoolgirl. "Have you ever thought," she said, as he entered the
music room, "how much these seances of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine
Nights,' except that I don't give you an opportunity to monopolize the
conversation as Heine did?" She held his hand longer than usual, as
she greeted him, and looked searchingly up into his face. "You are the
kindest man living; the kindest," she added, softly.

Everett's gray face colored faintly as he drew his hand away, for
he felt that this time she was looking at him and not at a whimsical
caricature of his brother. "Why, what have I done now?" he asked,
lamely. "I can't remember having sent you any stale candy or champagne
since yesterday."

She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a
book and held it out, smiling. "You got him to write it. Don't say you
didn't, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was
a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with
the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you
didn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata,
the most ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me
directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the letter;
I think you would better read it aloud to me."

Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window seat in which she
reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter,
his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that
it was a long one--wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance,
who was tender with his valet and his stable boy, with his old gondolier
and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.

The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the
fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy, with the warm
fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running
water, as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago.
The sky was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful
Moorish arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had
sketched an outline of them on the margin of his notepaper. The
subtleties of Arabic decoration had cast an unholy spell over him,
and the brutal exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream