se, and contemplated it and put it back. She leaned on
the rail and listened, undisturbed by the strength of his speech. In the
few short hours of their acquaintance the breadth of mutual
comprehension between them seemed to be widening at a ratio similar to
the circles spread by a stone striking still water.

"I am going to speak to you in my tongue," he went on presently, "I am
going to explain what I say with my music. Will you think to
understand?"

"I will try," she told him simply.

"It is so easy there," he said; "I think if I had but my violin I could
tell you all things. Because in music is all things. You must have feel
that yourself. Only I fear you must smile at my language--it is not so
easy to place your soul on a strange tongue."

"I shall not smile," she reassured him, "I am deeply interested."

"That is good of you," he replied, raising his head to cast a briefly
grateful glance at her, "if you may only really understand! For, just as
there are all colors for the painter to use, so are there all of the
same within music. There is from darkness far below the under bass to
the dazzle of sun in the high over the treble, and in between there are
gray, and rose, and rain, and twilight, so that with my bow I may make
you all a sad picture between the clefs or a gay one of flowers blooming
from G to upper C. And there is heat and cold there too,--one gasps in
the F flat down low and one shivers at the needle frost above high C.
And there are all feelings too. I may sing you to sleep, I may thunder
you awake, I may even steal your heart forever while you think to only
listen in pleasure."

"Not my heart," said Rosina decidedly.

"Ah, now it reminds me what I have begin to tell you," he
exclaimed,--"of love and of passion. I must get some music and teach you
that. Do you know the 'Souvenir' of Vieuxtemps?" he asked her abruptly.

"The 'Souvenir d'Amerique'?"

"No, no," he said impatiently, "not one of those. 'Le Souvenir' it is.
Not of anything. Just alone. If we were only to be of some together I
would teach it to you; I have never teach any one, but I would trouble
me to teach you that."

Then he paused and, producing his _etui_ for the second time, lit a
cigarette.

"It is like this," he went on, staring again upon the now rapidly
darkening waters, "you may learn all that I have begin to tell you there
in that one piece of music. There is love singing up and up in the
treble, and one listens and