“‘While not a man of them broke rank and spoke,
Or wrote me a vulgar letter all of love,
Or caught my hand and pressed it like a hand.
There have been moments if the sentinel,
Lowering his halbert to salute the queen,
Had flung it brutally and clasped my knees,
I would have stooped and kissed him with my soul.’”
She laid the book on the stand and sat quite still and silent for some time, then she murmured:
“We’re all alike, the queen and I, Corinne and her runaway prince. I wonder if all the world is longing just for—something different?”
The large room was almost dark; its only light came from the one little lamp on the mantel, which cast its dim halo upon her, and from the open door of the music room. Outside, the moon, the stars, and the river shed their mystic radiance over and through the slumbering valley.
“If there could only have been one word from some one—one note out of the earth or the sky—to promise me something....”
Clear, mellow, and resonant, one note rang out from the tower and rolled like an invisible golden wheel up the hills and down the valley.
Rosamond sat up, straining her ears.
“The tower bell!” she whispered. “It rang!—once! And it never rings after six!”
The sound was not repeated, and, after a time, she began to ask herself if perhaps she had not nodded for a second and dreamed that she heard the bell. She rose and went into the dining room to turn off the lights. Then she put out the little lamp on the chimney-piece and passed into the music room where she busied herself in replacing the Tschaikowsky album in the music rack and in closing the piano. The last duty here was to turn out the tall stand-lamp.
“I wonder did I dream that bell?” she queried, as she came back to the living room.