Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily call at the gaily painted ranch-house, he found Katharine laughing like a girl.  “Have you ever thought,” she said, as he entered the music-room, “how much these seances of ours are like Heine’s ‘Florentine Nights,’ except that I don’t give you an opportunity to monopolize the conversation?” She held his hand longer than usual as she greeted him.  “You are the kindest man living, the kindest,” she added, softly.

Everett’s grey face coloured faintly as he drew his hand away, for he felt that this time she was looking at him, and not at a whimsical caricature of his brother.

She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a book and held it out, smiling.  “You got him to write it.  Don’t say you didn’t, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was a place in Florida.  This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with the just in Paradise.  But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you didn’t know about it.  He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, and you are to play it for me directly.  But first for the letter; I think you would better read it aloud to me.”

Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window-seat in which she reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her.  He opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that it was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.

The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa.  The air was heavy with the warm fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running water, as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago.  The sky was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed.  The wonderful Moorish arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him.  He had sketched an outline of them on the margin of his note-paper.  The letter was full of confidences about his work, and delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and comradeship.

As Everett folded it he felt that Adriance had divined the thing needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful way.  The letter was consistently egotistical, and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just what she had wanted.  A strong realization of his brother’s charm and intensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himself even more resolutely than he consumed others.  Then he looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay before him.

“Like him, isn’t it?” she said, quietly.  “I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me.  I want you to tell him many things for me, yet they can all be summed up in this:  I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at the cost of what is half his charm to you and me.  Do you understand me?”