My Latin teacher, a scholarly man named Mr. Sylvester, thinking that Dr. Galbraith was a friend of my mother’s (for he, like the rest of the village, had heard of these visits, but had not troubled to acquaint himself with my mother’s social position so that for all he knew she could have been a well-bred woman who had seen better days) told me that I should value his society since he was a man of rare talents and had written more than a dozen musical compositions, chiefly string quartets. The information had come to Mr. Sylvester in a roundabout way and he could not even recall whether he had heard it from anyone of taste, but he was under the impression that the doctor had been first-rate. “But he gave it up for some reason, and one wonders why,” said the teacher. Accordingly, partly to satisfy my curiosity and partly to stave off his discomforting badinage, I told the doctor one night what I had heard.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did make up two or three little things. I hadn’t thought of them for years. I haven’t played my fiddle since my wife died. Who told you about that?”

“Mr. Sylvester, my Latin teacher.”

“Apropos of what?”

“Nothing. I suppose he knew you were taking care of Mamma.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I suppose you told him your Mamma was sick and that I was bringing her prescriptions and what not? Well, will you give my regards to Mr. Stuyvesant and tell him that my music is a dead soldier?” He had stopped his car beside our house and turning his fuddled face away from me, said into the fresh, windy April air, “You have brought up the past to me by what you’ve just said. When you are my age and can look back as many years as I can, you will remember this evening and say, ‘Ah, at last I know what Dr. Galbraith felt.’ Miss Moffatt, I had the most beautiful wife in the world. She was French and she was religious. My house is full of sacred objects that she bought in the by-streets of France and Italy. I have a prie-dieu. A Spanish crucifix dating from the thirteenth century, set in a tabernacle of Carrara marble. On my desk, a memento mori, a small skull carved of bone. I could never replace the least thing.” He faced me again. “You forgive an old man his reminiscences, don’t you?” He leaned across me to open the door, and as I stepped out, he said under his breath, “The odd thing is I have forgotten every word of French. Madeleine, there, I pronounce even it the English way.”