one had just stopped
playing. On the dim divans, men and women sat pensively holding
teacups on their knees. The firelight appeared to give life to the
many rows of books, as though all the fine emotions stored between
those covers were consuming the leather that was intricately tooled
with gold. Together with the wood smoke, and the scents of tobacco and
tea, there stole through the quiet room a redolence not of flowers or
of women's perfumes, but, as it were, the essence of the mementoes on
the walls and cabinets--those souvenirs of old friendships and past
attachments, or maybe of unconfessed infatuations and thwarted longings.

"I knew you'd come back," said Brantome, looking at Lilla out of his
massive, ruined face.

He made her sit down beside him on a divan apart from the rest. She
looked like a lady of cavalier days, he told her, in her tricorn hat of
maroon velvet, with a brown plume trailing down to the shoulder from
which was slipping her maroon-colored cloak edged with fur. He assured
her that she had never looked so lovely.

At these words she felt despondency instead of pleasure.

Across the room, half in shadow, with a ray of lamplight falling on his
hands, a young man sat sunken in a wheel chair. He was frail,
obviously an invalid; yet in the gloom of the alcove where he was
sitting his complexion seemed bronzed, as if from a life in the sun.
His sensitive face, disfigured by his sufferings and his thoughts,
leaned forward; his eyes were fixed on the keyboard of the piano.

"What!" Brantome exclaimed, "you don't know David Verne?"

She thought that she had heard some of his music, but could not recall
the impression it had made on her.

"The impression produced by Verne's work isn't usually vague."

"Has he so much talent?"

"I was confident," said Brantome, "that he would be the great composer
of this age."

"And now?"

"It's a question whether he'll live through the spring."

He told her David Verne's story.

At the height of his promise, in consequence, it was said by some, of a
certain mental shock, the young composer had fallen victim to a rare,
insidious disease, arising apparently from an organic derangement,
small in itself but deadly in its secondary effects. The chief
characteristics of this malady were a general muscular prostration
growing ever more profound, and a slowly increasing feebleness of vital
action. It was an illness for which medical science had provided n