"That's nonsense. On her part there can be no sorrow--only relief of mind, only joy, the prospect of a blissful union, a life without a cloud. Thank God, thank God, thank God! I never felt there was a God till now. Now I believe in Him--now I will lift up my heart to Him, in nightly and daily prayer, as Adam did by the side of Eve. Oh, thank God, the barrier is removed, and she can be mine! My own dear love--heart of my heart--life of my life!" He carried a fiddle among his scanty luggage, not the treasured inimitable Stradivarius, but a much-cherished little Amati; and by-and-by, having eaten some hurried scraps by way of dinner, he took the violin out of its case and went out to a little garden at the back of the inn, and in a vine-clad berceau gave himself up to impassioned utterance of the love that overflowed his heart. Music, and music only, could speak for him--music was the interpreter of all his highest thoughts. The stolid beer-drinkers came out of their smoke-darkened parlour to hear him, and sat silent and unseen behind an intervening screen of greenery, and listened and approved. "Ach, what for a fiddler! How he can play! Whole heaven-like. Not true, my friend?" He played and played, walking about under the vine-curtain--played till the pale grey evening shadows darkened to purple night, and the stars looked through the leafy roof of that rustic tunnel. He was playing to her; to her, his far-away love; to Suzette in England. He was pouring out his soul's desire to her, a hymn of sweet content; and he almost fancied that she could hear him. There must be some mystical medium by which such sounds can travel from being to being, where love attunes two souls in unison--some process now hidden from the dull mind of average man, as the electric telegraph was half a century ago. This is how a lover dreams in the summer gloaming, in a garden on the slope of a pine-clad hill, with loftier heights beyond, shadowy and dark against the deep blue of that infinite sky where the stars are shining aloof and incomprehensible, in remoteness that fills mortality with despair. She was free! That was Geoffrey's one thought in every hour and almost every minute of his breathless journey from Hartzburg to Discombe. She was free; and for her to be free meant that she was to be his. He imagined no opposition upon her side when once her engagement to Allan had been broken. She had been bound by that tie, and that only. His impetuous, passionate nature, self-loving and concentrative as the temper of a child, could conceive no restraining influence, nothing that could prevent her heart answering his, her hand yielding to his, and a marriage as speedy as law and Church would allow.