Releasing his hand from her clasp, he reached for his flute, and, with a pathetic delight in the presence of his enforced listener, raised the mouth of the instrument to his lips.  The tune he played was “The Last Rose of Summer,” and Laura sat patiently at his side until the end.  With the final note, even as he laid the flute lovingly across his knees, she saw that the music had strengthened and controlled his enfeebled mind.

“I want to tell you that I shall be married in the autumn, dear Uncle Percival,” she said with a renewed effort to penetrate the senile abstraction in which he lived.

“Married!” repeated the old man, with an indignant surprise for which she was entirely unprepared.  “Married!  Why, what on earth makes you do a ridiculous thing like that?  It’s out of the question,” he continued with an angry vehemence, “it is utterly and absurdly out of the question.”

For an instant it seemed to Laura that she had absolutely no response to offer.

“But almost everyone marries in the end, you know,” she said at last.

“I have lived very comfortably to be eighty-five,” retorted Uncle Percival, “and I never married.”

“Oh, but you never fell in love,” persisted Laura.

“In love?  Tush!” protested the old man with scorn, “and why should you?  I have never felt the need of it.”

“Well, I don’t think one can help it sometimes,” remonstrated Laura, a little helplessly.  “One doesn’t always want it, but it comes anyway.”

“Then if I didn’t want it I wouldn’t let it bother me,” said Uncle Percival, adding immediately.  “What does Rosa think of this state of things, I wonder—­Rosa is a very sensible woman.”

“Oh, she’s heartily pleased—­everybody is pleased but you.”

Uncle Percival shook his head in stubborn disapproval.  “People are always pleased at the mistakes of others,” he observed, “it’s human nature, I suppose, and they can’t help it, but I tell you I’ve seen a great deal too much of love all my life—­and it’s better left alone, it’s better left alone.”

Rising dejectedly, he wandered off to his rabbits, while Laura, as soon as the curtains at the door had fallen together again behind his shrunken little figure, forgot him with that complete forgetfulness of trivial details which is possible only to the mind that is in the possession of an absorbing emotion.  All hesitation, all uncertainty, all disappointment, had been swept from her consciousness as if by a destroying and purifying flame; and for the past few weeks she had lived with that passionate swiftness of sensation which gives one an ecstatic sense of rushing, like a winged creature, through crawling time.  Life, indeed, was winged for her at the moment; her soul flew; and she felt her happiness beating like a caged bird within her breast.  The agony of the imprisoned creature was there also, for she loved blindly without understanding why she loved—­and yet it was this hidden mystery of her passion, this divine miracle which attended its conception, that filled the world about her with the invisible, announcing hosts of angels.  She could explain nothing—­life, death, birth, the ordinary incidents of every day were but so many signs and portents of ’the unseen wonders; and every breath she drew seemed as great a miracle to her as the raising of Lazarus from the tomb.