me until ten o'clock. Theresa, who
had gone to bed, sent her a plate of lentil soup. While she was avidly
eating the soup she heard steps in the hall and a knock at the door.
Jason Philip entered. "Come along at once," was all he said. But she
understood. With trembling fingers she threw a shawl across her
shoulders, since the October nights were growing cool, and followed him
in silence.

They went up hill to Adler Street, turned into it and then into a
narrow, dark little alley at the right. A lantern hung above a door and
on a green glass pane were inscribed the words: "The Vale of Tears." A
greenish light suffused the stone stairs that led to the cellar, the
kegs and the desolate room filled with chairs and benches. A sourish
smell of wine arose from the place.

Beside the entrance there was a barred window. Beside it Jason Philip
stopped, and beckoned Marian to join him.

At the long tables below them sat a queer crowd. They were young men,
but such as one never finds in ordinary houses and only very rarely in
the streets. Want seemed to have driven them to huddle here, and the
night to have lured them from their hiding places--shipwrecked creatures
they seemed who had fled to a cavern on some deserted shore. They had
absurdly gay cravats and sad, pallid faces, and the greenish light made
them look altogether like corpses. It was long since a barber had
touched their hair or a tailor their garb.

A little aside from these sat two old fellows, habitual topers, not in
the best circumstances themselves, yet rather astonished at this dreary
Stygian crew. For they themselves at least received their weekly wage of
a Saturday night, while those others had obviously for years not worked
at all.

But in a dusky corner sat one at a piano and struck the keys with a
strange might. He had no score before him, but played from memory. The
instrument moaned; the strings hummed pitifully; the pedals creaked; but
the man who played was so bewitched by his music that he cared little
for the inadequacy of its communication. Wild as the tumult of the
playing sounded, the shrill and raging chords, the wild clamour of the
treble, the driven triplets and seething tremolos of the bass, yet the
deep emotion of the player, the ecstasy and world-estranged madness in
which he was, lent the scene a melancholy and a solemnity which would
have had its effect even without the greenish cellar and the cavernous
pallor of the listeners.

Mari