“This man Masters was among those who went to Texas in her struggle for independence, was he not, madam? And after the battle of San Jacinto was reported among the killed? He loved a young lady of Charleston, one whom you may know—a young lady whose proud family were opposed to her union with one who had come to Charleston a penniless youth and had been the architect of his own fortunes—they preferred a wealthy young Bostonian, who brought letters to every family of influence in the state. You knew this, madam?” His eyes asked pardon for this direct question and his voice was low with tenderness. “Yes, yes, I knew this,” she responded, lacing and interlacing her slow, slender fingers. “What—what more?” “You doubtless know, too, madam, that the report of his death was false and that he returned after peace was declared, to find his sweetheart had wedded his rival and gone to Boston to live. What you do not know”—here his voice took on a deep, full ring of joy—“is that he never, for one moment, never did and never has, doubted his sweetheart’s truth. To many men it is given to pass with unseeing eyes the holy worth of a woman’s love, but to Charles Masters it was given to know, when he had plighted his troth in the garden at Camellia, the sacredness of the gift that was his. Never once since then has his reverence for it or his belief in it failed.” Colonel Masters was doing more than telling a harrowing story—he was reading his own fate in her eyes. “Sir,” Mrs. Brooks started from her chair, “I will give you all I have in this world, I will give you all God gives me in Heaven to say those words again!” Word by word her voice had risen, growing stronger under the intense passion of her soul till it touched the highest note of her life, till it quivered like the tremulous tones of the flute thrilled at the holy reaches of the Infinite Beyond. “He still believes!” “Then where is he? Has he—” She shrank back from him, for there was a smile on his features, and though faces grow old, smiles never do. Reading her thoughts, he lifted her hand to his lips, and it was to her as when the mute touches the chords of the violin. The music was deep and plaintive, and the strain was one that makes all things possible. “He is here!” A cold, sleety rain was falling on the street outside, and the ice was forming on the elms of Beacon street. The shadows which sprang from the window that looked toward the west and the south lengthened themselves along the floor. Men hastened homeward in the gathering night, and a damp darkness settled down over the bleak landscape. But they sat by the window that looked toward the west, and though they faced the sunset, they saw it not, for the morning had come. CHAPTER XLIX