"Anything—what you will," Susanna answered.
"I 'll sing you a little Ave Maria," he decided. Whereupon, instead of proceeding, he turned his back squarely upon the piano, and squarely faced his hearers.
"When a musician composes an Ave Maria," he instructed them, "what he ought to try for is exactly what those nice old Fifteenth Century painters in Italy tried for when they painted their Annunciations. He should try to represent what one would have heard, if one had been there, just as they tried to represent what one would have seen. Now, how was it? What would one have heard? What did our Blessed Lady herself hear? Look. It was the springtime, and it was the end of the day. And she sat in her garden. And God sent His Angel to announce the 'great thing' to her. But she must not be frightened. She, so dear to God, the little maid of fifteen, all wonder and shyness and innocence, she must not be frightened. She sat in her garden, among her lilies. Birds were singing round her; the breeze was whispering lightly in the palm-trees; near-by a brook was plashing; from the village came the rumour of many voices. All the pleasant, familiar sounds of nature and of life were in the air. She sat there, thinking her white thoughts, dreaming her holy day-dreams. And, half as if it were a day-dream, she saw an Angel come and kneel before her. But she was not frightened—for it was like a day-dream—and the Angel's face was so beautiful and so tender and so reverent, she could not have been frightened, even if it had seemed wholly real. He knelt before her, and his lips moved, but, as in a dream, silently. All the familiar music of the world went on—the bird-songs, the whisper of the wind, the babble of the brook, the rumour of the village. They all went on—there was no pause, no hush, no change—nothing to startle her—only, somehow, they seemed all to draw together, to become a single sound. All the sounds of earth and heaven, the homely, familiar sounds of earth, but the choiring of the stars too, all the sounds of the universe, at that moment, as the Angel knelt before her, drew together into a single sound. And 'Hail,' it said, 'hail Mary full of grace!'"
For a minute, after he had finished, Adrian stood still, and no one spoke. Then he returned to the fireside, and sank back into his chair.
"What a beautiful—what a divinely beautiful—idea," Susanna said at last, with feeling.
"Beautiful," emphatically chimed in Protestant Miss Sandus.
"Stand still, true poet that you are,—I know you, let me try and name you," laughed Anthony, from the hearth-rug.
"Chrysostom—he should be named Chrysostom," said Miss Sandus.
"The world is a garden of beautiful ideas," was Adrian's modest acceptance of these tributes. "One only has to cull them. But now"—he rose—"I must toddle home. Are you going my way?" he inquired of Anthony.
"What?" protested Miss Sandus. "You're leaving us, without telling the experience of your life—the experience that you 'had to run' to tell us!"