asn't a
dream. We were all on the terrace, as we were last night. The
Klosters had come early in the afternoon. There wasn't a leaf
stirring, and not a sound except that lapping water against the bottom
of the wall where the larkspurs are. You know how sometimes when
everybody has been talking together without stopping there's a sudden
hush. That happened to-night, and after what seemed a long while of
silence the Grafin said to Kloster, "I suppose, Master, it would be too
much to ask you to play to us?"

"Here?" he said. "Out here?"

"Why not?" she said.

I hung breathless on what he would say. Suppose he played, out there
in the dusk, with the stars and the water and the forest all round us,
what would it be like?

He got up without a word and went indoors.

The Grafin looked uneasy. "I hope," she said to Frau Kloster, "my
asking has not offended him?"

But Bernd knew--Bernd, still at that moment only Herr von Inster for
me. "He is going to play," he said.

And presently he came out again with his Strad, and standing on the
step outside the drawingroom window he played.

I thought, This is the most wonderful moment of my life. But it
wasn't; there was a more wonderful one coming.

We sat there in the great brooding night, and the music told us the
things about love and God that we know but can never say. When he had
done nobody spoke. He stood on the step for a minute in silence, then
he came down to where I was sitting on the low wall by the water and
put the Strad into my hands. "Now you," he said.

Nobody spoke. I felt as though I were asleep.

He took my hand and made me stand up. "Play what you like," he said;
and left me there, and went and sat down again on the steps by the
window.

I don't know what I played. It was the violin that played while I held
it and listened. I forgot everybody,--forgot Kloster critically noting
what I did wrong, and forgot, so completely that I might have been
unconscious, myself. I was _listening_; and what I heard were secrets,
secrets strange and exquisite; noble, and so courageous that suffering
didn't matter, didn't touch,--all the secrets of life. I can't
explain. It wasn't like anything one knows really. It was like
something very important, very beautiful that one _used_ to know, but
has forgotten.

Presently the sounds left off. I didn't feel as though I had had
anything to do with their leaving off. There was dead silence. I
stood