The little girl sat close to his bench, but when they turned to her she made no reply. They raised her up. Their question never received an answer, and Franz with a wild cry fell upon his knees by her side. The child was dead.
For many years afterward the musician lived on in the old place at the foot of the hill, but he never again could be prevailed upon to strike a note of any instrument or listen to a strain of any music. More rarely than ever did he speak to a soul, and then it was only at the Christmas time, to tell again of the little Alice, his spirit of sound, to tell of that wonderful gloria of immortal praise sung by a multitude of the heavenly hosts, whose splendor, almost blinding to his eyes, had lighted up earth and sky over the far-off plains of Palestine, where the shepherds, centuries ago, were watching their flocks by night.
Strangers heard his tale with a scarcely concealed smile, and shook their heads sorrowfully as the old man, feeble and palsied, with a singular brilliance in his sunken eyes, turned away. But all the villagers spoke of him with respect, almost with awe, and the children learned to hush their mirth in reverence as he passed by. Margery, with a face quieter than ever, said little, but served her master with an untiring devotion, and after she had closed his eyes in death, when she was an old, old woman, sometimes in the evening she would suddenly break her long silence to tell a wondering group of Franz and the little Alice, and of the mysterious melody that played about the child.
And so the people of Paint Valley relate the story yet, and show the graves in the long grass of the village church-yard, where, side by side, they wait to join at the last day the throng whose immortal gloria shall surpass even that grand Christmas anthem—the song of the angels heard by the shepherds upon the plains of Judea.
THE END.
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