But they were all so kind and hearty that I could no more give way to dejection than to chill and cheerlessness before a genial wood fire. They seemed in truth to have taken me into the family. Barely was I now addressed formally as Richard Morton. It was simply "Richard," spoken with the unpremeditated friendliness characteristic of family intercourse. Heathen though I was, I thanked God that he had brought me among these true-hearted people; "and may He blast me," I muttered, "if I ever relapse into the old sneering cynicism that I once affected. Let me at least leave that vice to half-fledged young men and to bad old men."
One thing puzzled me. Miss Warren remained at her piano, and it struck me as a little odd that she did not find the music of her lover's voice preferable, but I concluded that music was one of the strongest bonds of sympathy between them, and one of the means by which he had won her affection. Sometimes, as her voice rose clear and sweet to my open windows, I answered remarks addressed to me with an inaptness that only Mrs. Yocomb understood.
Before very long, that considerate lady looked into my face a moment, and then said decisively:
"Richard, thee is getting tired. We must all bid thee good-night at once."
Adah looked almost resentfully at her mother, and lingered a little behind the others. As they passed out she stepped hastily back, and unclasping a rosebud from her breastpin laid it on the table beside me.
"It was the last one I could find in the garden," she said, breathlessly, and with its color in her cheeks. Before I could speak she was gone.
"It shall be treated with reverence, like the feeling which led to the gift," I murmured sadly. "Heaven grant that it may be only the impulse of a girlish fancy;" and I filled a little vase with water and placed the bud near the window, where the cool night air could blow upon it.
Still Miss Warren remained at the piano. "How singularly fond of music he is!" I thought.
I darkened my room, and sat at the window that I might hear every note. The old garden, half hidden by trees, looked cool and Eden-like in the light of the July moon, athwart whose silver hemisphere fleecy clouds were drifting like the traces of thought across a bright face. Motionless shadows stretched toward the east, from which the new day would come, but with a dreary sinking of heart I felt as it each coming day would bring a heavier burden.
But a little time passed before I recognized Chopin's Nocturne, to which I had listened with kindling hope on the night of the storm. Was it my own mood, or did she play it with far more pathos and feeling than on that never-to-be-forgotten evening? Be that as it may, it evoked a fiercer storm of unavailing passion and regret in my mind. In bitterness of heart I groaned aloud and insulted God.