"Play 'The Woods are Green' first," he said. "Then the other."

The Notary possessed the one high-walled garden in the village, and
though folk gathered outside and said that the baker was playing for
the sick man, there was no one in the garden save the fiddler himself.
Once or twice a lad appeared on the top of the wall, looking over, but
vanished at once when he saw Charley's face at the window. Long ere the
baker had finished, the song was caught up from outside, and before the
last notes of the violin had died away, twenty voices were singing it in
the street, and forty feet marched away with it into the dusk.

Darkness comes quickly in this land of brief twilight. Presently
out of the soft shadowed stillness, broken by the note of a vagrant
whippoorwill, crept out from Maximilian Cour's old violin the music
of 'The Baffled Quest of Love'.

The baker was not a great musician, but he had a talent, a rare gift of
pathos, and an imagination untrammelled by rigorous rules of harmony and
construction. Whatever there was in his sentimental bosom he poured into
this one achievement of his life. It brought tears to the eyes of
Narcisse Dauphin. It opened a gate of the garden wall, and drew inside a
girl's face, shining with feeling.

Maximilian Cour spoke for more than himself that night. His philandering
spirit had, at middle age, begotten a desire to house itself in a quiet
place, where the blinds could be drawn close, and the room of life made
ready with all the furniture of love. So he had spoken to his violin,
and it had answered as it had never done before. The soul of the lean
baker touched the heart of a man whose life had been but a baffled quest,