When I arrived, I found that she of the brown eyes had been rehearsing with my teacher and was on the point of leaving.  My teacher, with some expressions of surprise, asked why I was late, and I stammered out the first deliberate lie of which I have any recollection.  I told him that when I reached home from school, I found my mother quite sick, and that I had stayed with her awhile before coming.  Then unnecessarily and gratuitously—­to give my words force of conviction, I suppose—­I added:  “I don’t think she’ll be with us very long.”  In speaking these words I must have been comical; for I noticed that my teacher, instead of showing signs of anxiety or sorrow, half hid a smile.  But how little did I know that in that lie I was speaking a prophecy!

She of the brown eyes unpacked her violin, and we went through the duet several times.  I was soon lost to all other thoughts in the delights of music and love.  I saw delights of love without reservation; for at no time of life is love so pure, so delicious, so poetic, so romantic, as it is in boyhood.  A great deal has been said about the heart of a girl when she’ stands “where the brook and river meet,” but what she feels is negative; more interesting is the heart of a boy when just at the budding dawn of manhood he stands looking wide-eyed into the long vistas opening before him; when he first becomes conscious of the awakening and quickening of strange desires and unknown powers; when what he sees and feels is still shadowy and mystical enough to be intangible, and, so, more beautiful; when his imagination is unsullied, and his faith new and whole—­then it is that love wears a halo.  The man who has not loved before he was fourteen has missed a foretaste of Elysium.

When I reached home, it was quite dark and I found my mother without a light, sitting rocking in a chair, as she so often used to do in my childhood days, looking into the fire and singing softly to herself.  I nestled close to her, and, with her arms round me, she haltingly told me who my father was—­a great man, a fine gentleman—­he loved me and loved her very much; he was going to make a great man of me:  All she said was so limited by reserve and so colored by her feelings that it was but half truth; and so I did not yet fully understand.

III

Perhaps I ought not pass on in this narrative without mentioning that the duet was a great success, so great that we were obliged to respond with two encores.  It seemed to me that life could hold no greater joy than it contained when I took her hand and we stepped down to the front of the stage bowing to our enthusiastic audience.  When we reached the little dressing-room, where the other performers were applauding as wildly as the audience, she impulsively threw both her arms round me and kissed me, while I struggled to get away.