year, Rentgen professed his satisfaction; Van Kuyp stood on the highroad
to fame. Of that there could be no doubt; Elvard Rentgen would say so in
print. Alixe had been reassured--

Yet sitting now within the loop of her husband's music it suddenly
became insipid, futile, and lacking in those enchantments for which she
yearned. Her eyes dropped to the shapely hands meekly folded in her lap,
dropped because the bold, interrogative expression on Rentgen's face
disturbed her. She knew, as any woman would have known, that he admired
her--but was he not Richard's friend? His glance enveloped her with
piteous mockery.

The din was tremendous. After passages of dark music, in which the
formless ugly reigned, occurred the poetic duel between Sordello and
Eglamor at Palma's Court of Love. But why all this stress and fury? On
the pianoforte the delicate episode sounded gratefully; with the thick
riotous orchestration came a disillusioning transformation. There was
noise without power, there was sensuality that strove to imitate the
tenderness of passion; and she had fancied it a cloudy garden of love.
Alixe raised an involuntary hand to her ear.

"Yes," whispered the critic, "I warned him not to use his colours with a
trowel. His theme is not big enough to stand it." He lifted thin
eyebrows and to her overheated brain was an unexpected Mephisto. Then
the music whirled her away to Italy; the love scene of Palma and
Sordello. It should have been the apex of the work.

"Sounds too much like Tschaikowsky's Francesca da Rimini," interrupted
Rentgen. She was annoyed.

"Why didn't you tell Van Kuyp before he scored the work?" she demanded,
her long gray eyes beginning to blacken.

"I did, my dear lady, I did. But you know what musicians are--" He
shrugged a conclusion with his narrow shoulders. Alixe coldly regarded
him. There was something new and dangerous in his attitude to her
husband's music this evening.

Her heart began to beat heavily. What if her suspicions were but the
advance guard of a painful truth! What if this keen analyst of other
men's ideas--she dared not finish the thought. With a sluggish movement
the music uncoiled itself like a huge boa about to engulf a tiny rabbit.
The simile forced itself against her volition; all this monstrous
preparation for a--rabbit! In a concert-hall the poetic idea of the
tone-poem was petty. And the churning of the orchestra, foaming hysteria
of the strings, bellowing of the brass