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. "You have noticed the change in her to-night?" she said. "Yes. Have I not?" answered Durrance. "One has waited for it, hoped for it, despaired of it." "Are you so glad of the change?" Durrance threw back his head. "Do you wonder that I am glad? Kind, friendly, unselfish--these things she has always been. But there is more than friendliness evident to-night, and for the first time it's evident." There came a look of pity upon Mrs. Adair's face, and she passed out of the room without another word. Durrance took all of that great change in Ethne to himself. Mrs. Adair drew up the blinds of the drawing-room, opened the window, and let the moonlight in; and then, as she saw Ethne unlocking the case of her violin, she went out on to the terrace. She felt that she could not sit patiently in her company. So that when Durrance entered the drawing-room he found Ethne alone there. She was seated in the window, and already tightening the strings of her violin. Durrance took a chair behind her in the shadows. "What shall I play to you?" she asked. "The Musoline Overture," he answered. "You played it on the first evening when I came to Ramelton. I remember so well how you played it then. Play it again to-night. I want to compare." "I have played it since." "Never to me." They were alone in the room; the windows stood open; it was a night of moonlight. Ethne suddenly crossed to the lamp and put it out. She resumed her seat, while Durrance remained in the shadow, leaning forward, with his hands upon his knees, listening--but with an intentness of which he had given no sign that evening. He was applying, as he thought, a final test upon which his life and hers should be decided. Ethne's violin would tell him assuredly whether he was right or no. Would friendship speak from it or the something more than friendship? Ethne played the overture, and as she played she forgot that Durrance was in the room behind her. In the garden the air was still and summer-warm and fragrant; on the creek the moonlight lay like a solid floor of silver; the trees stood dreaming to the stars; and as the music floated loud out across the silent lawn, Ethne had a sudden fancy that it might perhaps travel down the creek and over Salcombe Bar and across the moonlit seas, and strike small yet wonderfully clear like fairy music upon the ears of a man sleeping somewhere far away beneath the brightness of the southern stars with the cool ni
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