against the wall, and he struck a few notes on it.

"Completely out of tune," he said; "but that doesn't matter. Now then!"

"But what am I to play?" asked Michael.

"Anything you like."

He sat down at the far end of the room, put his long legs up on to
another chair and waited. Michael sent a despairing glance at that
gay face, suddenly grown grim, and took his seat. He felt a paralysing
conviction that Falbe's judgment, whatever that might turn out to be,
would be right, and the knowledge turned his fingers stiff. From the few
notes that Falbe had struck he guessed on what sort of instrument his
ordeal was to take place, and yet he knew that Falbe himself would have
been able to convey to him the sense that he could play, though the
piano was all out of tune, and there might be dumb, disconcerting notes
in it. There was justice in Falbe's dictum about the temperament that
lay behind the player, which would assert itself through any faultiness
of instrument, and through, so he suspected, any faultiness of
execution.

He struck a chord, and heard it jangle dissonantly.

"Oh, it's not fair," he said.

"Get on!" said Falbe.

In spite of Germany there occurred to Michael a Chopin prelude, at which
he had worked a little during the last two months in London. The notes
he knew perfectly; he had believed also that he had found a certain
conception of it as a whole, so that he could make something coherent
out of it, not merely adding bar to correct bar. And he began the soft
repetition of chord-quavers with which it opened.

Then after stumbling wretchedly through two lines of it, he suddenly
forgot himself and Falbe, and the squealing unresponsive notes. He heard
them no more, absorbed in the knowledge of what he meant by them, of the
mood which they produced in him. His great, ungainly hands had all the
gentleness and self-control that strength gives, and the finger-filling
chords were as light and as fine as the settling of some poised bird on
a bough. In the last few lines of the prelude a deep bass note had to be
struck at the beginning of each bar; this Michael found was completely
dumb, but so clear and vivid was the effect of it in his mind that he
scarcely noticed that it returned no answer to his finger. . . . At the
end he sat without moving, his hands dropped on to his knees.

Falbe got up and, coming over to the piano, struck the bass note
himself.

"Yes, I knew it was dumb," he said, "but you made