Judith was standing by Mrs. Morris, looking at the flower beds where each little seedling was surrounded by a palisade of narrow strips of shingle.
Mrs. Morris brought out some chairs, and they sat talking in the dusk while the summer moon grew out of the horizon, and slowly, slowly sailed aloft, paling as it attained its height, till from a glowing disk of yellow it changed to a shadowless silver shield.
"Won't you sing to us, Miss Moore?" asked Andrew.
"Yes, do," urged Mrs. Morris.
"What will I sing!" asked Judith, but without waiting for an answer began. She sang an Italian love-song, a masterpiece of passion and pain—sang it as perhaps no living woman could sing it, making music in such fashion that the hearts of her hearers were melted within them, voicing in it all the timorous new joy, the half-happy fears that filled her heart, with somewhat of the poignant pathos of renunciation. Some one says, "Music is the counterpart of life in spirit speech," and it would seem that in one perfect song there may be condensed all the emotion of life and love, all the pathos of pain and parting. As the song died away Andrew gave a long sigh. The pleasure of such music ofttimes prolongs itself to pain. Perhaps it was some recognition of the great value of Judith's gift of song, perhaps it was because she sang familiarly an unknown tongue that made Andrew suddenly feel the chill of a great gulf fixed between them. The arms which had held her for a moment in the pasture-field yearned with ineffable longing for a joy denied them.
But Judith was singing again, "The Angels' Serenade," one of the loveliest things ever written. When she finished there was a silence. Mrs. Morris' hard-worked hands were clasped tremblingly together, tears were streaming over her face, her heart was yearning towards the little mounds in the unkempt churchyard.
"Hannah," said her grey-haired husband, laying his hand upon her shoulder. Their eyes met. That was all; but dumbly they had shared the cup of their sorrow. A bitter communion, one would say, yet good to make strong the spirit, as the bitter barks strengthen the body.
And a few minutes later Mrs. Morris slipped away into the house, perhaps to open that shrine where were hidden some tiny half-worn garments, perhaps out of sympathy for the two young people who might wish to be alone; and when Judith began to sing again, she and Andrew were alone, for Mr. Morris, with lumbering attempts at caution, had followed his wife.
Andrew's heart was aching with inexplicable pain. Judith was singing an old theme, composed long since by some frocked and cowled musician, whose rigid vows and barren life could not quite suppress the dream of music within his soul. It was a simple and austere melody, yet endued with a peculiar pathos, the yearning of a defrauded life for the joy that should have crowned it, the regret of a barren present for a fruitful past, the wail of the must be for the might have been.
And as she sang, the gulf which Andrew had perceived between them widened into a great black sea, across which her voice came to him where he stood alone forever upon the shore; and just as the pain grew too poignant to be borne, a bat darted near them, Judith gave a frightened cry and fled to his side, and the gulf was bridged in a second by a strong strand knit of a woman's foolish fear and a man's reassuring word.