Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/198

 to her of Anthony Jones, and rekindled the emotions she had experienced through him. But, strangely enough, the music promised even wilder, more incredible joys, 'Oh, happy, happy love.'

'Roger,' she cried rather piteously, 'is there anything in life that is all the things music talks about?'

'No,' he answered; 'you see, we live on promises. There is a smell in the air a month before spring comes, and it is more delicious, more intoxicating than spring itself. And sunrise always promises us more than the day brings, and youth more than age, and songs more than life. It is this incessant yearning that makes us poor human animals so sad and so happy.'

The theorbo throbbed an incessant tuneless accompaniment. 'Come, Lanice,' he said, throwing down the instrument, 'we will go to your mother's room and then, this afternoon, drive back to Florence by way of the Protestant Cemetery.'

At the end of the spring day they came to the high gate of a cemetery lying outside the city walls. The marble hills of Carrara had grown translucent as moonstones, and assumed liquid beauty. Two tired and playless children held out a wreath of laurel and white violets. Roger bought it, and, carrying the wreath and covered with the children's whispered thanks, they passed under the gate and entered the small cemetery. The day grew pink, and in a whisper Roger told Lanice that under these atmospheric con-