tice a day
for two years I shall recover what I have lost.'

He had succeeded beyond his hopes.

'Are you writing in that book?' he inquired carelessly as he threw down
the cigarette and turned away.

'I have just finished something,' I replied.

'Oh!' he said, 'I'm glad you aren't idle. It's so boring.'

He returned to the piano, perfectly incurious about what I did,
self-absorbed as a god. And I was alone in the garden, with the
semicircle of trees behind me, and the facade of the old house and its
terrace in front. And lying on the lawn, just under the terrace, was
the white end of the cigarette which he had abandoned; it breathed
upwards a thin spiral of blue smoke through the morning sunshine, and
then it ceased to breathe. And the music recommenced, on a different
plane, more brilliantly than before. It was as though, till then, he
had been laboriously building the bases of a tremendous triumphal arch,
and that now the two wings met, dazzlingly, soaringly, in highest
heaven, and the completed arch became a rainbow glittering in the face
of the infinite. He played two of his great concert pieces, and their
intricate melodies--brocaded, embroidered, festooned--poured themselves
through the windows into the garden in a procession majestic and
impassioned, perturbing the intent soul of the solitary listener,
swathing her in intoxicating sound. It was the unique virtuoso born
again, proudly displaying the ultimate sublime end of all those
slow-moving exercises to which he had subdued his fingers. Not for ten
years had I heard him play so.

When we first came into the house I had said bravely to myself: 'His
presence shall not deter me from practising as I have always done.' And
one afternoon I had sat down to the piano full of determination to
practise without fear of him, without self-consciousness. But before my
hands had touched the keys shame took me, unreasoning, terror-struck
shame, and I knew in an instant that while he lived I should never more
play the piano. He laughed lightly when I told him, and I called myself
silly. Yet now, as I sat in the garden, I saw how right I had been. And I
wondered that I should ever have had the audacity even to dream of
playing in his house; the idea was grotesque. And he did not ask me to
play, save when there arrived new orchestral music arranged for four
hands. Then I steeled myself to the ordeal of playing with him, because
he wished to try over the music. And he wou