ring families
would come to the Pesotskys', and would sing and play the piano
with Tanya; sometimes a young neighbour who was a good violinist
would come, too. Kovrin listened with eagerness to the music and
singing, and was exhausted by it, and this showed itself by his
eyes closing and his head falling to one side.

One day he was sitting on the balcony after evening tea, reading.
At the same time, in the drawing-room, Tanya taking soprano, one
of the young ladies a contralto, and the young man with his violin,
were practising a well-known serenade of Braga's. Kovrin listened
to the words--they were Russian--and could not understand their
meaning. At last, leaving his book and listening attentively, he
understood: a maiden, full of sick fancies, heard one night in her
garden mysterious sounds, so strange and lovely that she was obliged
to recognise them as a holy harmony which is unintelligible to us
mortals, and so flies back to heaven. Kovrin's eyes began to close.
He got up, and in exhaustion walked up and down the drawing-room,
and then the dining-room. When the singing was over he took Tanya's
arm, and with her went out on the balcony.

"I have been all day thinking of a legend," he said. "I don't
remember whether I have read it somewhere or heard it, but it is a
strange and almost grotesque legend. To begin with, it is somewhat
obscure. A thousand years ago a monk, dressed in black, wandered
about the desert, somewhere in Syria or Arabia. . . . Some miles
from where he was, some fisherman saw another black monk, who was
moving slowly over the surface of a lake. This second monk was a
mirage. Now forget all the laws of optics, which the legend does
not recognise, and listen to the rest. From that mirage there was
cast another mirage, then from that other a third, so that the image
of the black monk began to be repeated endlessly from one layer of
the atmosphere to another. So that he was seen at one time in Africa,
at another in Spain, then in Italy, then in the Far North. . . .
Then he passed out of the atmosphere of the earth, and now he is
wandering all over the universe, still never coming into conditions
in which he might disappear. Possibly he may be seen now in Mars
or in some star of the Southern Cross. But, my dear, the real point
on which the whole legend hangs lies in the fact that, exactly a
thousand years from the day when the monk walked in the desert, the
mirage will return to the atmosphere of