Lying there she heard the call of it, that tremendous music which shook through her and loosened a caged voice within herself.

Her own poetry became for her but a little part of the tumultuous, passionate instinct for life within her--for life not as it was in its reality but as she saw it transfigured and enkindled by the imagination that lives in dreams.
Suddenly from the darkened silence of the house below a thin sound rose trembling, and then, gaining strength, penetrated into the closed chambers.

Uncle Percival was at his flute again; he had arisen in the night to resume his impassioned piping; and, rising hurriedly, Laura lit her candle and went out into the hall, where a streak of light beneath Angela's door ran like a white thread across the blackness.

Listening a moment, she heard inside the nervous pacing to and fro of tired yet restless feet, and after a short hesitation she turned the knob and entered.
"Oh, Aunt Angela, did the flute wake you ?" she asked.
For answer the long white figure stopped its frantic movement and turned upon her a blanched and stricken face out of which two beautiful haunted eyes stared like living terrors--terrors of memory, of silence, of the unseen which had taken visible forms.
"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" cried Angela breathlessly, raising her quivering hands to her ears.

"I have heard it before! I have heard it--long before!" She paused, gasping, and without a word Laura turned and ran down the dark staircase, while with each step the air that Uncle Percival played sounded louder in her ears.
The door of the library was open, and as she entered she called out in a voice that held a sob of anger, "Uncle Percival, how could you ?" His attentive, deafened ears were for his music alone, and, letting the flute fall from his hands, he turned to look at her with the pathetic, innocent enquiry of a good but uncomprehending child.