On this particular evening, when young Purcell went to call for lights, the Signor was seated out on his little terrace enjoying the twilight and a cigarette together. There were two chairs on the scrap of grass, and a little table with an inkstand upon it, and the cup in which the Signor had taken his black coffee after dinner. He was leaning back in his chair puffing out the fragrant smoke from his cigarette, lazily watching it as it floated upwards, and now and then noting down a bar or two of music upon a piece of paper in his hand. Sometimes he took the cigarette from his mouth and hummed a scrap of an air, keeping time with his head and hand. There was no one who was more popular in the country as a composer of graceful drawing-room songs than Signor Rossinetti. It was something refined, something elegant that was expected from him, delicate soprano melodies, fine combinations for tenors and altos. It was very seldom that he took any trouble about the bass, but his tenor songs were justly considered exquisite. He liked to have a pretty set of verses on hand, and “set” them in the intervals of more serious business. The summer evening, when he sat out after dinner upon his scrap of terrace, was the time when he had most inspiration. His pupil and _protégé_, young Purcell, thought there was no intellectual pleasure higher and more elevating, than to sit out here in the shadow of the great grey buttresses, with the cheerful distant noises of the High Street floating upward from the foot of the wall, and to watch the Signor composing his song. The young fellow would run in to the piano and “try over” every line of the symphony as it came welling out from that fount of music. He said often that, except one thing, there was no such delight in the world. To see genius working under his very eyes, what a privilege it was! To Purcell it seemed that his master read his heart, and uttered his deepest sentiments for him in those compositions. To-night his mind had been lulled out of great commotion and disturbance by the rosy vision of love and happiness that had breathed through the notes. It was glad, it was sad, it was full of suggestion, it wrung the very heart of Purcell--“’Twas in the time of roses, they plucked them as they passed.” Would that time ever come for him? He thought the Signor had read the depths of his heart, the wistful longing which was sometimes hope and sometimes despair, the pictures he made to himself of one day wandering by _her_ side, one day gathering roses for her. He murmured over and over the tune of the refrain in a kind of ecstasy as he went to his mother’s room, his fancy excited, his head all on fire, half with the delicious sense of being friend to such a genius, and sharing, as it were, the very inspiration that produced such beautiful things--and half with the pride and delight of being so deeply in love and hanging on so exquisite an edge of anguish. The Signor himself did