Then, as she rose to go, a strange thing happened. The tender strains of a waltz, Simple Aveu, floated softly in broken snatches in on the west wind, and again--as one who hears a voice that calls--Isabel came back. She raised herself suddenly. Her face was alight, transfigured--the face of a woman on the threshold of Love's sanctuary.
"Oh, my dearest!" she said, and her voice thrilled as never Dinah had heard it thrill before. "How I have waited for this! How I have waited!"
She stretched out her arms in one second of rapture unutterable; and then almost in the same moment they fell. The youth went out of her, she crumpled like a withered flower.
"Biddy!" she said. "Oh, Biddy, tell them to stop! I can't bear it! I can't bear it!"
Dinah went to the window and closed it, shutting out the haunting strains. That waltz meant something to her also, something with which for the moment she felt she could not cope.
Turning, she saw that Isabel was clinging convulsively to the old nurse, and she was crying, crying, crying, as one who has lost all hope.
"But it's too late to do her any good," mourned Biddy over the bowed head. "It's the tears of a broken heart."