the shoes that had some street mud on them; nor the face
with the pinched upper lip, the dishevelled hair, the nervously knitted
brow.

Under the linen in the clothes press he had found the silver buckle he
had given her. "Why did she hide it there?" he asked himself. The
condition of her soul when she opened the press and put the buckle in it
became vivid, real; it became blended with his own soul, a part of his
own being.

Then he discovered the harp without the strings. He took it to his room;
and when he looked at it, he had the feeling that he was looking at a
face without flesh.

"Am I too melancholy, too heavy for you?" This was the question that
came to him from the irrevocable past. And that other statement: "I will
be your mother made young again." And that other one, too: "I, too, am a
living creature."

He recalled some old letters she had written him and which he had
carefully preserved. He read them over with the care and caution he
would have exercised in studying an agreement, the disregard or
fulfilment of which was a matter of life and death. And there were bits
of old embroidery from her girlhood which he acquired in order to lock
them up and keep them as if they were sacred relics.

She stood out in his mind and his soul more vividly with each passing
hour. If he remembered how she sat and listened when he played or
discussed his works, he felt something clutching at his throat. He
recalled how she crept up to him once and pressed her forehead against
his lips: this picture was enshrouded in the awe of an unfathomable
mystery.

It was not a sense of guilt that bound him to his deceased wife. Nor was
it contrition or self-reproach or the longing that finds expression in
the realisation of accumulated neglect. His fancy warded off all thought
of death; in its creative defiance it invested the dead woman with a
reality she never possessed while making her pilgrimage in bodily form
over this earth.

It was not until now that she really took on form and shape for Daniel.
And this is the marvellous and the criminal feature of the musician.
Things and people are not his while they are his. He lives with shadows;
it is only what he has lost that is his in living form. Dissociated from
the moment, he reaches out for the moment that is gone; he longs for
yesterday and storms to-morrow with unassimilative impatience. What he
has in his hands is withered; what lies behind him is in flower. His
thinking