her dreams, here, at all events, was a mansion where that company might have fitly gathered.  Great elms and beeches bent under their load of leaves to the lawn; about the lawn, flowers made a wealth of color, and away to the right of the house twisted stems and branches, where the green of the apples was turning to red, stood evenly spaced in a great orchard.  And the mill stream tunneling under the road and the wall ran swiftly between green banks through the garden and the orchard, singing as it ran.  There lingered, she thought, an ancient grace about this old garden, some flavor of forgotten days, as in a room scented with potpourri; and she walked the lawn in a great contentment.

The house within charmed her no less.  It was a place of many corners and quaint nooks, and of a flooring so unlevel that she could hardly pass from one room to another without taking a step up or a step down.  Sylvia went about the house quietly and with a certain thoughtfulness.  Here she had been born and a mystery of her life was becoming clear to her.  On this summer evening the windows were set wide in every room, and thus in every room, as she passed up and down, she heard the liquid music of running water, here faint, like a whispered melody, there pleasant, like laughter, but nowhere very loud, and everywhere quite audible.  In one of these rooms she had been born.  In one of these rooms her mother had slept at nights during the weeks before she was born, with that music in her ears at the moment of sleep and at the moment of her waking.  Sylvia understood now why she had always dreamed of running water.  She wondered in which room she had been born.  She tried to remember some corner of the house, some nook in its high-walled garden; and that she could not awoke in her a strange and almost eery feeling.  She had come back to a house in which she had lived, to a scene on which her eyes had looked, to sounds which had murmured in her ears, and everything was as utterly new to her and unimagined as though now for the first time she had crossed the threshold.  Yet these very surroundings to which her memory bore no testimony had assuredly modified her life, had given to her a particular possession, this dream of running water, and had made it a veritable element of her nature.  She could not but reflect upon this new knowledge, and as she walked the garden in the darkness of the evening, she built upon it, as will be seen.

As she stepped back over the threshold into the library where her father sat, she saw that he was holding a telegram in his hand.

“Wallie Hine comes to-morrow, my dear,” he said.

Sylvia looked at her father wistfully.

“It is a pity,” she said, “a great pity.  It would have been pleasant if we could have been alone.”