The artist laughed.

"Our poor little mystery," he said.
But the novelist--as they went toward the house--cursed Mrs.Taine, James Rutlidge, and all their kin and kind, with a vehement earnestness that startled his companion--familiar as the latter was with his friend's peculiar talent in the art of vigorous expression.
After dinner, that evening, the painter and the novelist sat on the porch--as their custom was--to watch the day go out of the sky and the night come over valley and hill and mountain until, above the highest peaks, the stars of God looked down upon the twinkling lights of the towns of men.

At that hour, too, it was the custom, now, for the violinist hidden in the orange grove, to make the music they both so loved.
In the music, that night, there was a feeling that, to them, was new--a vague, uncertain, halting undertone that was born, they felt, of fear.

It stirred them to question and to wonder.

Without apparent cause or reason, they each oddly connected the troubled tone in the music with the stopping of the automobile from Fairlands Heights, that afternoon, at the gate of the little house next door--the artist, because of Mrs.Taine's insistent inquiry about the, to him, unknown musician;--Conrad Lagrange, because of the manner of the girl in the garden when James Rutlidge appeared and because of the critic's interest when they had spoken of the violinist in the studio.