re lingered,
she thought, an ancient grace about this old garden, some flavor of
forgotten days, as in a room scented with potpourri; and she walked the
lawn in a great contentment.

The house within charmed her no less. It was a place of many corners and
quaint nooks, and of a flooring so unlevel that she could hardly pass
from one room to another without taking a step up or a step down. Sylvia
went about the house quietly and with a certain thoughtfulness. Here she
had been born and a mystery of her life was becoming clear to her. On
this summer evening the windows were set wide in every room, and thus in
every room, as she passed up and down, she heard the liquid music of
running water, here faint, like a whispered melody, there pleasant, like
laughter, but nowhere very loud, and everywhere quite audible. In one of
these rooms she had been born. In one of these rooms her mother had slept
at nights during the weeks before she was born, with that music in her
ears at the moment of sleep and at the moment of her waking. Sylvia
understood now why she had always dreamed of running water. She wondered
in which room she had been born. She tried to remember some corner of the
house, some nook in its high-walled garden; and that she could not awoke
in her a strange and almost eery feeling. She had come back to a house in
which she had lived, to a scene on which her eyes had looked, to sounds
which had murmured in her ears, and everything was as utterly new to her
and unimagined as though now for the first time she had crossed the
threshold. Yet these very surroundings to which her memory bore no
testimony had assuredly modified her life, had given to her a particular
possession, this dream of running water, and had made it a veritable
element of her nature. She could not but reflect upon this new knowledge,
and as she walked the garden in the darkness of the evening, she built
upon it, as will be seen.

As she stepped back over the threshold into the library where her father
sat, she saw that he was holding a telegram in his hand.

"Wallie Hine comes to-morrow, my dear," he said.

Sylvia looked at her father wistfully.

"It is a pity," she said, "a great pity. It would have been pleasant if
we could have been alone."

The warmth of her gladness had gone from her; she walked once more in
shadows; there was in her voice a piteous appeal for affection, for love,
of which she had had too little in her life and for which she