The child Jessie had nursed with such care was toddling about,
looking rueful with loss. George had gone to America, and the whole
of that family's joy had vanished from the earth.
The subject was not resumed between Miss St. John and Robert. The
next time he saw her, he knew by her pale troubled face that she had
heard the report that filled the town; and she knew by his silence
that it had indeed reference to the same girl of whom he had spoken
to her. The music would not go right that evening. Mary was
distraite, and Robert was troubled. It was a week or two before
there came a change. When the turn did come, over his being love
rushed up like a spring-tide from the ocean of the Infinite.
He was accompanying her piano with his violin. He made blunders,
and her playing was out of heart. They stopped as by consent, and a
moment's silence followed. All at once she broke out with something
Robert had never heard before. He soon found that it was a fantasy
upon Ericson's poem. Ever through a troubled harmony ran a silver
thread of melody from far away. It was the caverns drinking from
the tempest overhead, the grasses growing under the snow, the stars
making music with the dark, the streams filling the night with the
sounds the day had quenched, the whispering call of the dreams left
behind in 'the fields of sleep,'--in a word, the central life
pulsing in aeonian peace through the outer ephemeral storms.
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