.

"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