"And I do
want to finish this, and the dear girl will not know whether she plays
five minutes or an hour."

Hildegarde was right. Bell played on and on, one lovely thing after
another; and forgot her friend up-stairs, and her walk, and everything
else in the world, save herself and _die edle Musica_.

Now, it happened about this time,--or it may have been half an hour
after,--that some one else stood and listened to the music that filled
the early December twilight with warmth and beauty and sweetness. A
young man had come running lightly up the steps of the veranda, with a
tread that spoke familiarity, and eagerness, too; had hastened towards
the door, but paused there, at the sound of the piano. A young man, not
more than twenty at the most, very tall, with a loose-jointed spring to
his gait, that might have been awkwardness a year or two ago, but sat
not ungracefully on him now. He had curly brown hair, and bright blue
eyes, set rather far apart under a broad, white forehead; not a handsome
face, but one so honest and so kindly that people liked to look at it,
and felt more cheerful for doing so.

The blue eyes wore a look of surprise just now; surprise which rapidly
deepened into amazement.

"Oh, I say!" he murmured. "That can't be,--and yet it must, of course.
How on earth has she learned to play like this?" He listened again. The
notes of Schumann's "_Faschingsschwank_" sounded full and clear. The
bright scene of the Vienna carnival rose as in a magic vision; the
flower-hung balconies, the gardens and fountains, the bands of dancers,
like long garlands, swinging hand in hand through the white streets. The
young man saw it all, almost as clearly as his bodily eyes had seen it
a year before. And the playing! so sure and clear and brilliant, so full
of fire and tenderness--

"But she cannot have learned all this in two years!" said Jack Ferrers.
"It's incredible! She must have worked at nothing else; and she has
never said a word-- Ah! but, my dear girl, you must have the violin for
that!"

The player had struck the opening chords of the great Mendelssohn
Concerto for piano and violin.

The youth lifted something that he had laid down on the veranda
seat,--an oblong black box; lifted it as tenderly as a mother lifts her
sleeping child. Then he stepped quietly into the twilight hall.

So it came to pass that Bell, who was very near the gate of heaven
already, heard suddenly, as it seemed to her, the music o