There was that year a short, gorgeous Indian summer, at the end of September and the beginning of October. It was as warm as August; the foliage a mass of beauty—a dying, sunset glow, ready to be whirled away in showers at the first swirl of the equinoctial gales which would assuredly succeed this calm. But in the meantime, while it lasted, it was beautiful. They sat with open windows at Monk’s Gate, and with the door set open too; and while the lamp burnt on the centre table, John Leyburn stretched out his long limbs on the old settee, and smoked his pipe; while Somerville, in the easy-chair at the other side of the window, twisted cigarettes with his long, slender fingers; and Jerome, at the piano, would play, or sing, or improvise, for hours. Many a one of the village people, many a ‘lover and his lass,’ would pause to lean upon the top of the gate and hearken to the broken, fitful gusts of sound which came wafted to them from the open window and door. Strange, weird harmonies of Liszt, and Chopin, and Schumann, smote their astonished ears, and songs still stranger and more eerie than the tunes—deep, mournful German melodies, or some wild, homely, _Volkslied_ would float out and strike them with wonder, such music being assuredly for the first time heard in Wellfield. Once or twice on these evenings, sometimes alone, and sometimes with John (when he was not at Monk’s Gate), always with her big dog by her side, a girl’s figure had passed the gate as the music was going on. Once it had been a passionate love-song that was borne to her ears, and once again the overpowering sweetness of a movement of the so-called ‘Moonlight’ sonata. She had turned her face towards the place whence the sounds came, but neither hurried nor stayed her sauntering walk, and, returning the greetings of those who loitered and listened, had passed on. Those evenings of music were the only pleasant part of Jerome’s existence at that time. Then he forgot for a moment Nita’s pale face and Sara’s letters; then the old student days seemed to have returned again—the old days of music, of midsummer madness, of ‘carelesse contente.’