For a moment a faint, kindly smile chased away the look of intense weariness in Garth’s eyes.

“You transparent old fool, Judson!” he said indulgently.  “You’re like an old hen clucking round.  Very well, make me a whisky, if you will, and give me one of those superlative sandwiches.”

Judson waited on him contentedly.

“Anything more to-night, sir?  Shall I close the window?” with a gesture towards the wide-open window near which his master sat.

Garth shook his head, and, when at last the manservant had reluctantly taken his departure, he remained for a long time sitting very still, staring out across the moon-washed garden.

Presently he stirred restlessly.  Glancing round the room, his eyes fell on his violin, lying upon the table with the bow beside it just as he had laid it down that morning after he had been improvising, in a fit of mad spirits, some variations on the theme of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

He took up the instrument and struck a few desultory chords.  Then, tucking it more closely beneath his chin, he began to play—­a broken, fitful melody of haunting sadness, tormented by despairing chords, swept hither and thither by rushing minor cadences—­the very spirit of pain itself, wandering, ghost-like, in desert places.

Upstairs Judson turned heavily in his bed.

“Just hark to ’im, Maria,” he muttered uneasily.  “He fair makes my flesh creep with that doggoned fiddle of his.  ’Tis like a child crying in the dark.  I wish he’d stop.”

But the sad strains still went on, rising and falling, while Garth paced back and forth the length of the room and the candles flickered palely in the moonlight that poured in through the open window.

Suddenly, across the lawn a figure flitted, noiseless as a shadow.  It paused once, as though listening, then glided forward again, slowly drawing nearer and nearer until at last it halted on the threshold of the room.

Garth, for the moment standing with his back towards the window, continued playing, oblivious of the quiet listener.  Then, all at once, the feeling that he was no longer alone, that some one was sharing with him the solitude of the night, invaded his consciousness.  He turned swiftly, and as his glance fell upon the silent figure standing at the open window, he slowly drew his violin from beneath his chin and remained staring at the apparition as though transfixed.

It was a woman who had thus intruded on his privacy.  A scarf of black lace was twisted, hood-like, about her head, and beneath its fragile drapery was revealed the beautiful face and haunting, mysterious eyes of Elisabeth Durward.  She had flung a long black cloak over her evening gown, and where it had fallen a little open at the throat her neck gleamed privet-white against its shadowy darkness.

The mystical, transfiguring touch of the moon’s soft light had eliminated all signs of maturity, investing her with an amazing look of youth, so that for an instant it seemed to Trent as though the years had rolled back and Elisabeth Eden, in all the incomparable beauty of her girlhood, stood before him.