, or
extending favour, yet had a feeling of being unable to get away, which
seemed to come from the very strength of the spell she laid on him. The
magnetism with which she held him reacted on herself. Thoroughly
sceptical at first, she could not remain so. He was too utterly morose
and unhappy if she did not smile on him, too alive and excited and
grateful if she did. The change in his eyes from their ordinary
restless, fierce, and furtive expression to humble adoration or wistful
hunger when they looked at her could never have been simulated. And she
had no lack of chance to see that metamorphosis. Wherever she went,
there he was. If to a concert, he would be a few paces from the door,
waiting for her entrance. If to a confectioner's for tea, as likely as
not he would come in. Every afternoon he walked where she must pass,
riding to the Neroberg.

Except in the gardens of the Kochbrunnen, when he would come up humbly
and ask to sit with her five minutes, he never forced his company, or
tried in any way to compromise her. Experience, no doubt, served him
there; but he must have had an instinct that it was dangerous with one so
sensitive. There were other moths, too, round that bright candle, and
they served to keep his attentions from being too conspicuous. Did she
comprehend what was going on, understand how her defences were being
sapped, grasp the danger to retreat that lay in permitting him to hover
round her? Not really. It all served to swell the triumphant
intoxication of days when she was ever more and more in love with living,
more and more conscious that the world appreciated and admired her, that
she had power to do what others couldn't.

Was not Fiorsen, with his great talent, and his dubious reputation, proof
of that? And he excited her. Whatever else one might be in his moody,
vivid company, one would not be dull. One morning, he told her something
of his life. His father had been a small Swedish landowner, a very
strong man and a very hard drinker; his mother, the daughter of a
painter. She had taught him the violin, but died while he was still a
boy. When he was seventeen he had quarrelled with his father, and had to
play his violin for a living in the streets of Stockholm. A well-known
violinist, hearing him one day, took him in hand. Then his father had
drunk himself to death, and he had inherited the little estate. He had
sold it at once--"for follies," as he put it crudely. "