“Thank you, dear Uncle Orme.  Mother will enjoy her peaches when she knows you gathered them with the dew still upon their down.  Go, finish your dream; Heaven grant it be sweet!  No one shall even pass your door for the next hour, unless shod with velvet, or with silence.  This is the first of mother’s birthdays I have had an opportunity to celebrate, and I wish to surprise her pleasantly.  Go back to sleep.”

She stood on tiptoe and lightly kissed his swarthy cheek.

“Unfortunately my brain is not sufficiently vassal to my will, to implicitly obey its mandates; and dropping on my pillow and falling into slumber are quite different things.  Beside (you need not arch your eyebrows any higher, when I assure you that), despite my honourable years, my hearing is as painfully acute as that of the giant fabled to watch ‘Bifrost,’ and who ’heard the grass growing in the fields, and the wool on the backs of young lambs.’  Last night, just as I was lapsing into a preliminary doze, two vagrant nightingales undertook an opera that brought them to the large myrtle under my window, where I hoped they had reached the finale.  But one of them—­the female, I warrant you, from the clatter of her small tongue (if female nightingales can sing)—­audaciously perched on the stone balcony in front of my open window, and such a tirade of hemi-demi-semi-quavers never before insulted a sleepy man.  I clapped my hands, but they trilled as if all Persia had sent them a challenge.  Now I am going to take a bath, and since you persisted in making me get up, I intend to punish you with my society, just as soon as I finish my toilette.  If you see a brace of birds smothered in truffles on the dinner-table, you may suspect the fate of all who violate my dreams.  Even feathered lovers are a pest.  My little girl, before you begin your reign in my California home, I shall remind you of your promise, that no lover of yours will ever dare to darken my doors.”

With a smile lingering about her lip, after her uncle’s departure, Regina filled the epergne on the table with a mass of rose-coloured oleanders—­her mother’s favourite flowers, and fringed the edge with geraniums and fuchsias.  On her plate she laid a cluster of tuberoses, grouped and tied in the shape of a heart, with spicy apple geranium leaves girdling the waxen petals.  The breath of the oleanders perfumed the room, and when quite satisfied with the arrangement of the flowers, Regina piled the crimson peaches and golden grapes in a pyramid on the silver stand in the centre.

Drawing from her pocket a slender roll of sheet music fastened with rose ribbon, and a tiny envelope addressed to her mother, she placed them upon Mrs. Laurance’s plate, crowning all with the white heart of tuberoses.

For some days she had been haunted by a musical idea, which gradually developed as she improvised into a Nocturne, full of plaintive minor passages; and this first complete musical composition, written out by her own hand, she had dedicated to her mother.  It was called:  “Dreams of my mother.”