as presented in
his complexion--bronzed as though by the sun, mockingly bestowing on
him one of the aspects of health.

When he listened to music suddenly he became adult. There appeared in
his face a glimpse of a masculine, severely critical soul, a nature to
be satisfied with little less than perfection. And no doubt it was
this habit of stern analysis, involuntarily carried over from art into
life, that had helped to make him "impatient of stupidity."

The black-haired woman at the piano was attempting Beethoven.

"Talk to me," said David Verne. "I don't wish to hear this."

He added that Beethoven was intolerable on the piano--a composer who
had never had a thought that was not orchestral.

"Like myself," he vouchsafed, with that smile of a mistreated child.
"I, too, thought orchestrally. There was no group of instruments rich
enough to suit my ambitions, just as the scale was too poor for what I
wished to express. A tone speech inadequate to describe what I had to
describe--do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes."

"Never mind. It is all over."

He sat in the wheel chair in so collapsed a pose that he seemed
subjected to some exceptional pull of gravitation. His bronzed hands,
on the chair arms, appeared to be welded to the brown wood; his head,
resting against the chair back, never turned. But his troubled eyes,
stealing round in their sockets, surprised on Lilla's countenance a
look as if all her compassions had been united to find the fading young
genius as their congenial object.

It was hard to talk to him, since every topic must lead to some
interest that he was relinquishing. His doom, hanging over them like a
black cloud, stifled all those gleams of enthusiasm which normally
would have illumined such a conversation. But presently he forgot
himself in watching her moving lips, in gazing at her hair, her throat,
her hands, in letting his eyes embrace, with reluctance, all her
singularity which was made doubly exquisite by the fastidiousness of
her costume. While he was inhaling her perfume, he listened with a
blank look to the silvery cadence of her voice.

At last he asked her:

"Do you come here often?"

"Oh, no."

"Why not?" He stared at the abandoned piano. "Why not every week?"
And, in a soft, impulsive rush of words, blurred by haste, and maybe by
intention, "I have so few weeks left."

CHAPTER XXIII

As week followed week, it was evident that David Verne watch