mind.

'Magdalen,' I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and sincere
that he believed it.

I could see that he was taken aback.

'It is a holy name and a good name,' he said, after a pause. 'Magda, you
are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read
it, won't you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me, and
play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.'

And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The
influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had
resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and
lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and
dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in
conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing
out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had
ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I
abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not
disgrace myself.'

'Unless it was Chopin,' whispered Diaz. 'No one could ever see two things
at once as well as Wagner.'

We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the
page, and then the hunters' horns were heard departing from the garden of
love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a scarce-heard drone,
out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the horns died away,
so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the future. I
surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty which we
were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.

The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once
feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of
modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of
heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I
might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and
complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam
about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a
background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they
were the emotions of love--the sense of the splendour of love, the
headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the
finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the
universe, and my heart whispered