utionary theories of Pierre Bounier regarding
the touch. So subtle could the art of touch be cultivated, the pianist
believed, that the blind could _feel_ colour on the canvas of the
painter. He spent weeks experimenting with a sensitive manometer,
gauging all the scale of dynamics. No doubt these fumblings on the edge
of a new science temporarily hurt his play. With a dangerous joy he
pressed the keys of his instrument, endeavouring to achieve more
delicate shadings. He quarrelled with the piano manufacturers for their
obstinate adherence to the old-fashioned clumsy action; everything had
been improved but the keyboard--that alone was as coldly unresponsive
and inelastic as a half-century ago. He had fugitive dreams of wires
that would vibrate like a violin. The sounding-board of a pianoforte is
too far from the pianist, while the violinist presses his strings as one
kisses the beloved. Little wonder it is the musical monarch. A new
pianoforte, with passionately coloured overtones, that could sob like a
violoncello, sing like a violin, and resound with the brazen clangours
of the orchestra--Liszt had conceived this synthesis, had by the sheer
force of his audacious genius compelled from his instrument ravishing
tones that were never heard before or--alas!--since.

Even the antique harpsichord had its compensations; not so powerful in
its tonal capacity, it nevertheless gave forth a pleading, human quality
like the still small angelic voice. Davos pondered these problems,
pondered Chopin's celestial touch and the weaving magic of his many-hued
poems; Chopin--Keats, Shelley, and Heine battling within the walls of a
frail tender soul.

The sound of footsteps and voices aroused him. He shivered with disgust.
More people! Two men, well advanced in life, followed by two women,
barely attracted his notice, until he saw that the little creature who
waddled at the rear of the party was a Japanese in European clothes.
Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro.
Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair and gray eyes,
attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch--1840
or thereabouts. As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish
beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway
he heard humming in his head the "glance motive" from Tristan and
Isolde. They passed on, but not leaving him as he was before; a voice
whispered in the secret recesses of