“They are songs, _chère petite_,” wrote the old man—“of revolt, of exile, and of death. There is no other folk-song like them in the world, just as there is no history in the world like Poland’s. Your poor friend knows them all—has known them all from his childhood. They will speak to him of his torn country. He will hear in them the cry of the White Eagle—the White Eagle of Poland—as she soars wounded and bleeding over the southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and forests of Lithuania. It is in these songs that we Poles listen to the very heart-beats of our outraged country. Our songs—our music—our poets—our memories:—as a nation that is all we have—except the faith in us that never dies. _Hinc surrectura!_ Yes, she shall rise again, our Poland! Our hope is in God, and in the human heart, the human conscience, that He has made. Comfort your friend. He has lost much, poor boy!—but he has still ears to hear, a brain, an imagination to conceive. Let him work still for music and for Poland—they will some day reward him!” And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series of variations on the lovely theme of the “Heynal”—that traditional horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of Panna Marya—of which Otto had spoken to Falloden. But all these things were as yet hidden from Otto. Falloden and Constance corresponded about them, in letters that anybody might have read, which had behind them, nevertheless, a secret and growing force of emotion. Even Mrs. Mulholland, who was rapidly endearing herself both to Constance and Radowitz, could only guess at what was going on, and when she did guess, held her tongue. But her relations with Falloden, which at the beginning of his residence in the cottage had been of the coldest, gradually became less strained. To his own astonishment, he found the advice of this brusque elderly woman so important to him that he looked eagerly for her coming, and obeyed her with a docility which amazed himself and her. The advice concerned, of course, merely the small matters of daily life bearing on Otto’s health and comfort, and when the business was done, Falloden disappeared. But strangely amenable, and even humble as he might appear in these affairs to those who remembered his haughty days in college, for both Constance and Mrs. Mulholland quite another fact emerged from their experience of the cottage household during these weeks:—simply this—that whatever other people might do or be, Falloden was steadily, and perhaps unconsciously, becoming master of the situation, the indispensable and protecting power of Otto’s life.