e stared through her and beyond her for several seconds, and then came
back to himself with a start.

"Then I do play," he exclaimed, and went to where he had placed the case
of rosewood, and lifting it from the small table, set it on the floor
and knelt before it, as a priest at some holy shrine. She leaned her
head against the chair back and watched him, her eyes searching each
detail of his appearance without her spirit being cognizant of the
hunger which led to the seeking, of the soul-cry which strove to fortify
itself against the inevitable that each hour was bringing nearer.

He felt in his pocket for his key-ring, chose from the many one
particular key, inserted it, turned it, left it sticking in the hole,
and then, with a curious breathless tightening of the lips, he raised
the lid, put aside the knit wool shield of white and violet, and with
the tender care which a mother bestows upon a very tiny baby lifted the
violin from its resting-place. As he did so his eye travelled with a
sudden keen anxiety over its every detail, as if the possibility of harm
was ever present, and as he held it to his ear and snapped the strings
one after another, she beheld with something akin to awe the dawning of
another nature upon his face, of another light within his eyes, the
strange light of that abnormal, unworldly gift which God gave man and
which we have elected to call by the name of genius. As he rested there
before her, tightening one cord, trying another, listening to a third,
she realized--with a sorrowful sense of her own remoteness at the
minute--that this man was some one who, in spite of all their hours of
intercourse, she had never met before.

He loosened the bow from its buttons and rose slowly to his feet. His
eyes sought hers, and he said dreamily:

"What shall I play?" even while his fingers were forming dumb notes, and
the uplifted bow quivered in the air as if impatient.

"Oh," she said, acutely conscious of her inferiority,--of the ten
thousand leagues of difference between his grandeur and her
commonplace,--"play what you will."

He hardly seemed to hear, his eyes roved over the little salon as if its
walls were gone, and he beheld a horizon illimitless. He just slightly
knit his brows and then he bowed his head above the instrument and said
briefly:

"Listen!"

And she listened.

And the unvoiceable wonder of his magic!

It was an intangible echo of the Tonhalle at Zurich, with the music that