IT was through a book they spoke of, a book which he said he would bring to her, that they came at last face to face, and, for the first time really, alone together. He found her in the firelit room; her last pupil had gone, and she was sitting before her harp, her hands in her lap, her eyes looking vaguely in front of her. There had been a fall of snow, and the chill February afternoon outside was desolate in its white and gray and black. Within there was the serenity, the flicker of firelight, Madame Vicaud, and her silent harp.

She turned her head with her smile of welcome, and, as he drew a chair near hers, lightly touched a harp-string. The throb of the vibrant note echoed in the young man’s heart. For the first time, after a winter of patient waiting, he was alone with his mystery, alone with the woman he adored; for that he adored this cold, sweet, faded woman, with her fragrant life blossoming on its black background, was as much a fact of his existence as that he had seen her photograph on that distant sunny day.

“My work is over,” she said. “I am feeling indolent. Ah, you have brought the book; thank you. Will you read it now to me—a little?” She leaned back, smiling still; her eyes, he felt, studying him more openly, yet more kindly, than ever before. “Will you ring for the candles then, or would you rather sit on for a little while in this blindman’s holiday?”

“I would rather sit on, and have you play to me, if you are not too tired.”

“I am tired of teaching—of listening, not of playing.” She at once adjusted her foot, stretched her arms, bending to the instrument, and played an old and plaintive melody.

“Exquisite,” said Damier, when it ended. “It is so staid in form, yet so melancholy in feeling.”

“Yes; like the melancholy of a sad heart, whispering its sorrow to itself under the lace and brocade of a long-dead epoch.” She went on to a joyous little pastoral, and said, smiling at him, that that was like a bank of primroses; and, after the next, “And that all innocent solemnity and sweetness, like a nun’s prayer.” And when she had finished they sat in silence for some time.

“Have you always played?” he asked her at last, seeing her suddenly as a young girl in a white dress, with a green ribbon around her waist, an emerald locket at her throat, sitting at her harp.

“Always; I learned when I was a child.” The unspoken sadness of the past seemed to steal about them; he seemed to hear the “sad heart whispering to itself” as they sat there in the firelight.

“I have often thought,” Madame Vicaud said, turning suddenly toward him and smiling with a touch of constraint, “that it was very nice of you to seek us out like this. I have often wanted to speak to you about it. For it was you rather than Mrs. Mostyn who sought, was it not? What made you think of it?” she asked, her smile growing in sweetness as his eyes dwelt on hers.

“It was a very romantic reason,” Damier said; “or, no, I won’t belittle my reason by that trivial term; it was a very serious reason, rather, a very real one. I saw your photograph in an album belonging to Mrs. Mostyn, and then I wanted to see you.”

She looked at him in silence.

“How very strange!” she presently said. “Wanted enough for that?”

“To seek you? Quite enough; more.” He smiled. “Yes, it was strange—is strange. I did not know whether you were alive or dead, nor did Mrs. Mostyn.”

“And you set out in quest of me?”

“Yes, after a time. At first Mrs. Mostyn could hear nothing of you. I met another old acquaintance of yours—Sir Henry Quarle. He talked to me about you, too, and immediately afterward I got your address from Mrs. Mostyn and her letter to you. Then I set out at once.”

Madame Vicaud looked at him with a grave, speculating look for some silent moments, before saying, turning her eyes away and once more showing constraint in her voice:

“You heard that I had been unfortunate—unhappy? You were sorry for that?”

“Yes; but had you been very fortunate, very happy, I should still have looked for you.”

“But why? Did you like my face so much?”

“So much. I felt that I should have known you long ago, and that, having missed you for so long through the stupid accident of the years, I must know you always in the future. I should have felt it had you been dead.” His charming eyes dwelling on her with a perfect candor and simplicity, for it was easy at last to speak these familiar thoughts to her, he added: “I needed you; I had always needed you. And so, it seemed to me, you needed me; your eyes in the photograph called to me.”

At this she looked swiftly at him with an astonishment that slowly softened to a smile. “You are a strange, a good friend,” she said.

“You accept me as such?”

“Ah, yes,” she replied, “I accept you as such—gratefully. I don’t call you. Those days are over.”

She rose, pushing the harp aside, and walked slowly down the room, pausing at the window and looking out. He divined that she was much touched, even that there were tears in her eyes. He feared to show her the depths of his feeling for her, his longing to enter her life, help her, if it might be, in it; but, rising too, he said in a slightly trembling voice: “You don’t need my friendship, but I need yours. Let that be my claim.”

“Your claim to what?” she asked, her face still turned from him.

“To the hope that I may grow into your confidence—the hope that you will lean on me, trust me completely, and that, with time, I may, perhaps, mean something to you of what you mean to me.”

Her face now, as she looked at him, showed a curious, a vivid look of wonder, humor, tenderness, and sadness.

“What am I, that I should mean so much to you? You don’t know me.”

“Is that your kind way of intimating that I can mean nothing to you—that you don’t know me?” he smiled.

“Ah, don’t think that I am so hard and stupid!” she said quickly. “Don’t think that I am fencing with you, trying to ward off a friendship I can’t appreciate. Don’t think that I have no need of a friend. I have; I have—only I had forgotten to feel it. I do not say that I have no friends; you know that I have, and good ones—only you do not wish to rank with them. Isn’t it so?” She smiled swiftly, from her gravity, at him. “There is good Madame DÉpressier, and the comtesse, and little Sophie,—who needs me, poor child, in her struggle and loneliness,—and the others, true and good all; but none near. You would be near,—would you not?—and have me share pain with you—lean on you, you say.” His fine young face, stern with eagerness, followed her words in silent assent. “But it would be difficult for me to have such a friend. I have never had such a friend. It is difficult, painful to me to show myself, be myself. I am a hard, I fear a spoiled, stunted nature. You heard—of course you must have heard; it is the one thing that anybody must hear who hears at all of me—that my marriage was very unhappy. It warped me; it froze me. There was no one to help me when I needed help, or to hear me, even had I not been too proud to call, and I lost the power of appeal or self-expression. If I had been gentler, less bitter in my despair, less rebellious, I might have kept more in touch with life, been more natural, more responsive. As it is, I can still feel—deeply, deeply; but it is hard for me to respond. I am old enough to be your mother. No? Well, almost.” She smiled slightly at his exactitude. “I am very different from the girl in the photograph whose eyes called to you—prophetic eyes they must have been! You must not expect fine things of me; you must not idealize me.” She put her hand gently, maternally on his shoulder. “Never idealize me. That is a dangerous—a terrible thing to do.”

“Can you look at me,” he asked, putting his hand on hers—“can you look at me and think that I could idealize you?—see you as anything else than you are? Don’t you feel that, indeed, I can see you much more clearly than you see yourself—the girl in the photograph, and the woman old enough, almost old enough, to be my mother? You are shut into your present. I see you in it—and in all your past.”

She stood looking gravely into his eyes as he looked into hers. In hers there was—not seen by him and hardly felt by herself—a swiftly passing, an immense regret, an immense sadness. It was like the sweeping shadow of a flying wing, and left only the limpidity of sweetest, most candid acquiescence. In his eyes, too, there was regret—passionate regret; and he felt it, and felt that she could not understand or read it, nor the vague, strong hope that so strangely informed it.

“So I have a friend, a new yet an old friend,” said Madame Vicaud. “You perplex me, but I believe in all you say. You give me great happiness.”

He lifted the hand under his and bent his lips to it. She looked down at his bowed head with a smile that was a benediction.

On that first day of their friendship, as they sat together, she again before her harp, it was, oddly, he who leaned and confided. Almost boyishly, under her comprehending eyes, he unfolded for her his life, its deepest efforts and its deepest disappointments. Madame Vicaud, while he talked and she questioned, drew her fingers softly, from time to time, across her harp-strings. He never forgot the hour, nor the sense of communion that the silvery ripple of the harp-strings made paradisiacal.

“And will you not marry? Have you not thought of marrying?” she asked.

He considered her with what he knew to be a whimsical smile at her unconsciousness.

“I have been too great a coward ever to get further than thinking of it. My love-affairs have rarely passed the speculative stage. My ideals of marriage are of a most exacting nature.”

“Ah, that is well,” she said. “Never lower them to fit some reality that, for the moment, appeals. I hope,” she added, “that you will some day find the woman who realizes them.”

No, the silly accident oi the years too much blinded her, Damier felt, for her to see, yet, that she was the woman. He himself was too much dazzled to see beyond the fact itself. Any question of love or marriage seemed irrelevant, did not enter at all into this wonderful and happy place where her harp rippled, her eyes smiled, where she understood that he had found her.