Back of this was a reason which she had her mother's promise not to mention,--the physician's recommendation--a change of scene. He spoke of slight malarial influences, and how many odd forms they took; of dyspepsia and its queer freaks; of the confining nature of house cares, and of how often they "ran down the whole system." His phrases were French, but they had all the weary triteness of these; while Marguerite rejoiced that he did not suspect the real ailment, and Zosephine saw that he divined it perfectly. A change of scene. Marguerite had treated the suggestion lightly, as something amusingly out of proportion to her trivial disorder, but took pains not to reject it. Zosephine had received it with troubled assent, and mentioned the small sugar-farm and orangery of the kinsman Robichaux, down on Bayou Terrebonne. But the physician said, "If that would not be too dull;" mentioned, casually, the city, and saw Marguerite lighten up eagerly. The city was chosen; the physician's sister, living there, would see Marguerite comfortably established. All was presently arranged. "And you can take your violin with you, and study music," he said. Marguerite had one, and played it with a taste and skill that knew no competitor in all the surrounding region. It had belonged to her father. Before she was born, all Lafayette parish had known it tenderly. Before she could talk she had danced--courtesied and turned, tiptoed and fallen and risen again, latter end first, to the gay strains he had loved to wring from it. Before it seemed safe, for the instrument, to trust it in her hands, she had learned to draw its bow; and for years, now, there had been no resident within the parish who could not have been her scholar better than to be her teacher. When Claude came, she had shut the violin in its case, and left the poor thing hidden away, despising its powers to charm, lost in self-contempt, and helpless under the spell of a chaste passion's first enchantment. When he went, she still forgot the instrument for many days. She returned with more than dutiful energy to her full part in the household cares, and gave every waking hour not so filled to fierce study. If she could not follow him--if a true maiden must wait upon faith--at least she would be ready if fate should ever bring him back. But one night, when she had conned her simple books until the words ran all together on the page, some good angel whispered, "The violin!" She took it and played. The music was but a song, but from some master of song. She played it, it may be, not after the best rules, yet as one may play who, after life's first great billow has gone over him, smites again his forgotten instrument. With tears, of all emotions mingled, starting from her eyes, and the bow trembling on the strings, she told the violin her love. And it answered her: