The rustling of Mrs. Belding’s ample approach broke in upon her trance and Farnham’s litany.  He rose, not without some confusion, to greet her, and Alice, with bright and even playful eyes, said, “Mamma, what do you think this errant young cavalier has come to say to us?”

Mrs. Belding looked with puzzled inquiry from one to the other.

“Simply,” continued Alice, “that he is off for Japan in a day or two, and he wants to know if we have any commissions for him.”

“Nonsense!  Arthur, I won’t listen to it.  Come over to dinner this evening and tell me all about it.  I’ve got an appointment this very minute at our Oriental Gospel rooms and cannot wait to talk to you now.  But this evening, you must tell me what it all means, and I hope you will have changed your mind by that time.”

The good lady did not even sit down, but rustled briskly away.  Perhaps she divined more of what was toward than appeared—­but she did as she would have wished to be done by, when she was young, and left the young people to their own devices.

Farnham turned to Alice, who was still standing, and said, “Alice, my own love, can you not give me one word of hope to carry with me?  I cannot forget you.  My mind cannot change.  Perhaps yours may, when the ocean is between us, and you have time to reflect on what I have said.  I spoke too soon and too rashly.  But I will make amends for that by long silence.  Then perhaps you will forgive me—­perhaps you will recall me.  I will obey your call from the end of the world.”

He held out his hand to her.  She gave him hers with a firm warm grasp.  He might have taken courage from this, but her composure and her inscrutable smile daunted him.

“You are not going yet,” she said.  “You have forgotten what you came for.”

“Yes—­that song.  I must hear it again.  You must not think I am growing daft, but that song has haunted me all day in the strangest way.  There is something in the way you sing it—­the words and your voice together—­that recall some association too faint for me to grasp.  I can neither remember what it is, nor forget it.  I have tried to get it out of my mind, but I have an odd impression that I would better cherish it—­that it is important to me—­that life or death are not more important.  There!  I have confessed all my weakness to you, and now you will say that I need a few weeks of salt breeze.”

“I will sing you the song first.  Perhaps we may pluck out its mystery.”

She preluded a moment and sang, while Farnham waited with a strained sense of expectancy, as if something unspeakably serious was impending.  She sang with far more force and feeling than the night before.  Her heart was full of her happy love, as yet unspoken, and her fancy was pleased with that thought that, under the safe cover of her music, she could declare her love without restraint.  She sang with the innocent rapture of a mavis in spring, in notes as rich and ardent as her own maiden dreams.  Farnham listened with a pleasure so keen that it bordered upon pain.  When she came to the line,