nd in a brass cage a blue and
crimson macaw blinking at the somber Thames. Finally there was the
studio to which he was eagerly escorted by Stella.

"I haven't done anything but just have it whitewashed," she said. "I
wanted you to choose the scheme, as I'm going to make all the noise."

The windy March sunlight seemed to fill the great room when Michael and
his sister entered it.

"But it's absolutely empty," he exclaimed, and indeed there was nothing
in all that space except Stella's piano, looking now almost as small and
graceful as in Carlington Road it had seemed ponderous.

"You shall decorate the room," she said. "What will you choose?"

Michael visualized rapidly for a moment, first a baronial hall with
gothic chairs and skins and wrought-iron everywhere, with tapestries and
blazonries and heavy gold embroideries. Then he thought of crude and
amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples, with
Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet, even
as Michael's fancy decked itself with kaleidoscopic intentions, his mind
swiftly returned to the keyboard's alternations of white and black, so
that in a moment exotic splendors were merged in esoteric significance.

"I don't think we want anything," he finally proclaimed. "Just two or
three tall chairs and a mask of somebody--Beethoven perhaps--and black
silk curtains. You see the piano wouldn't go with elaborate
decorations."

So every opportunity of prodigal display was neglected, and the studio
remained empty. To Michael, all that windy Eastertide, it was an
infallible thrill to leave behind him the sedate Georgian house and,
crossing the little walled rectangle of pallid grass, to pause and
listen to the muffled sound of Stella's notes. Never had any entrance
seemed to him so perfect a revelation of joy within as now when he was
able to fling wide open the door of the studio and feel, while the power
and glory of the sonata assailed him, that this great white room was
larger even than the earth itself. Sitting upon a high-backed chair,
Michael would watch the white walls melting like clouds in the sun,
would see their surface turn to liquid light, and fancy in these clear
melodies of Stella that he and she and the piano and the high-backed
chair were in this room not more trammeled than by space itself. Alan
sometimes came shyly to listen, and while Stella played and played,
Michael would wonder if ever these two would mak