ut where his grannie's head must be lying asleep in
its sad thoughts, on the opposite side of the partition.

He lay looking at the light. There came a gentle tapping at his window.
A long streamer of honeysuckle, not yet in blossom, but alive with the
life of the summer, was blown by the air of the morning against his
window-pane, as if calling him to get up and look out. He did get up and
look out.

But he started back in such haste that he fell against the side of his
bed. Within a few yards of his window, bending over a bush, was the
loveliest face he had ever seen--the only face, in fact, he had ever yet
felt to be beautiful. For the window looked directly into the garden
of the next house: its honeysuckle tapped at his window, its sweet-peas
grew against his window-sill. It was the face of the angel of that
night; but how different when illuminated by the morning sun from then,
when lighted up by a chamber-candle! The first thought that came to him
was the half-ludicrous, all-fantastic idea of the shoemaker about his
grandfather's violin being a woman. A vaguest dream-vision of her having
escaped from his grandmother's aumrie (store-closet), and wandering free
amidst the wind and among the flowers, crossed his mind before he had
recovered sufficiently from his surprise to prevent Fancy from cutting
any more of those too ridiculous capers in which she indulged at will in
sleep, and as often besides as she can get away from the spectacles of
old Grannie Judgment.

But the music of her revelation was not that of the violin; and
Robert vaguely felt this, though he searched no further for a fitting
instrument to represent her. If he had heard the organ indeed!--but he
knew no instrument save the violin: the piano he had only heard through
the window. For a few moments her face brooded over the bush, and
her long, finely-modelled fingers travelled about it as if they were
creating a flower upon it--probably they were assisting the birth or
blowing of some beauty--and then she raised herself with a lingering
look, and vanished from the field of the window.

But ever after this, when the evening grew dark, Robert would steal
out of the house, leaving his book open by his grannie's lamp, that its
patient expansion might seem to say, 'He will come back presently,' and
dart round the corner with quick quiet step, to hear if Miss St. John
was playing. If she was not, he would return to the Sabbath stillness
of the parlour