in, stopped in the dimness to listen. A troubled uncertainty made
itself felt through the strains, a sudden discordant crash jarred
through the room, and the performer rose abruptly. He came forward.

'O my prophetic soul, magnolias!' said Nelly, from her lounge, just
outside the lighted circle.

It had just come from him, the light, exquisite basket he held filled
with great, pink, flushed magnolia blooms. Nelly raved in most
fashionably extravagant adjectives. Lois looked at it with hungry eyes,
but motionless and speechless. He laid it before her on the table, and
turned away. She stood for a moment looking gravely down on it, then
buried her face among the cool petals with a sudden caressing motion.
Looking up again shortly, 'Thank you,' she said simply to the giver
chatting carelessly.

A broad illumination flooded the other end of the parlor a minute after,
and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little
skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she
could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed
with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous
with purple light, shining through the tears that gathered in them.

Then the piano began, played dreamily, irregularly, with slender, single
threads of tune, and frequent pauses, as if the preoccupied mind let the
listless fingers fall away from the keys. They gathered up finally all
the broken strains into a low, slow-moving harmony. Through it Moore
heard the soft lap of waves, the slow rock of Pacific tidal swells,
flowing and ebbing and flowing again through flaming noons, about
half-submerged bits of world, palm-shaded, sun-drenched, or swaying
white with moonlight under purple midnights, holy with the clear burning
stars: heard the gurgle and ripple of falling streams, deepening into
the wide flow of mighty rivers, bearing in their calm sweep the secrets
of a zone--of ice-choked springs, of the dead stillness of Northern
forests, and the overgrowth, and passionate life of endless summers.

The red and white combatants now held truce over a queen check, while
the players sat silent, listening.

Suddenly, through the murmur and rhythmic flow of water sounds, struck
shrill and sharp the opening strains of a march--not such marches as
mark time for dainty figures crowding ballroom floors, but triumphant,
cruel, proud, with throbbing drum-beat--steadying the tramp of weary
feet