As the days came and went, he had continued to go to see her ever since the night when he had stood with her at the gate and felt the bitterness of her lack of sympathy; but all that had passed now, and unconsciously they had grown nearer to each other. There had been a tacit understanding between them until just a few weeks before. It was on a warm spring evening: he had just passed through her gate and started towards the house, when the opening chords of the piano struck on his ear through the opened window and arrested him. Elizabeth had a pleasant little voice, with a good deal of natural pathos in it. As the minister's daughter, the scope of her songs was properly, according to Dexter, rather limited, but that evening she was singing softly to herself a love-song. The words were these:
If Death should claim me for her own to-day,
And softly I should falter from your side,
Oh, tell me, loved one, would my memory stay,
And would my image in your heart abide?
Or should I be as some forgotten dream,
That lives its little space, then fades entire?
Should Time send o'er you its relentless stream,
To cool your heart, and quench for aye love's fire?
I would not for the world, love, give you pain,
Or ever compass what would cause you grief;
And oh, how well I know that tears are vain!
But love is sweet, my dear, and life is brief;
So, if some day before you I should go
Beyond the sound and sight of song and sea,
'T would give my spirit stronger wings to know
That you remembered still and wept for me.
She was alone in the room. The song was hardly finished when Brent stepped through the window and laid his hand over hers where they rested on the keys.
"Why do you sing like that, Elizabeth?" he said, tremulously.
She blushed and lowered her eyes beneath his gaze, as if she already knew the words that were on his lips, or feared that her soul lay too bare before him.
"Why do you think of death?" he asked again, imprisoning her hands.
"It was only my mood," she faltered. "I was thinking, and I thought of the song, and I just sang it."
"Were you thinking of any one in particular, Lizzie?"
Her head drooped lower until her face was hidden, but she did not answer. A strange boldness had come to him. He went on: "I listened as you were singing,