do you say?" he asked as Maurice paused; but his
thoughts were plainly elsewhere. This fact is, just at this moment, he
was intent on watching some ladies: were they going to notice him or
not? The bow made and returned, he brought his mind back to Maurice
with a great show of interest.

Here, however, they all turned in to Seyffert's Cafe and, seating
themselves at a long, narrow table, waited for Schilsky, whom they
intended to fete. But minutes passed, a quarter, then half of an hour,
and still he did not come. To while the time, his playing of the
concerto was roundly commented and discussed. There was none of the ten
or twelve young men but had the complete jargon of the craft at his
finger-tips; not one, too, but was rancorous and admiring in a breath,
now detecting flaws as many as motes in a beam, now heaping praise. The
spirited talk, flying thus helter-skelter through the gamut of opinion,
went forward chiefly in German, which the foreigners of the party spoke
with various accents, but glibly enough; only now and then did one of
them spring over to his mother-tongue, to fetch a racy idiom or point a
joke.

Not having heard a note of Schilsky's playing, Maurice did not trust
himself to say much, and so was free to observe his right-hand
neighbour, a young man who had entered late, and taken a vacant chair
beside him. To the others present, the new-comer paid no heed, to
Maurice he murmured an absent greeting, and then, having called for
beer and emptied his glass at a draught, he appeared mentally to return
whence he had come, or to engage without delay in some urgent train of
thought. His movements were noiseless, but startlingly abrupt. Thus,
after sitting quiet for a time, his head in his hands, he flung back in
his seat with a sort of wildness, and began to stare fixedly at the
ceiling. His face was one of those, which, as by a mystery, preserve
the innocent beauty of their childhood, long after childhood is a thing
of the past: delicate as the rosy lining of a great sea-shell was the
colour that spread from below the forked blue veins of the temples, and
it paled and came again as readily as a girl's. Girlish, too, were the
limpid eyes, which, but for a trick of dropping unexpectedly, seemed
always to be gazing, in thoughtful surprise, at something that was
visible to them alone. As to the small, frail body, it existed only for
sake of the hands: narrow hands, with long, fleshless fingers, nervous
hands