s seated there, but the notes moved and the touch was human. He shrank
back from the piano and stood in the farthest corner of the room,
listening intently. When at last the music ceased, he had a great desire
to say something, and yet could choose no words. And, as he hesitated,
there was a sudden click and the lights were switched off. He fled from
the darkness down the stairs to the brightly lit room below. For a while
he was too overcome to be able to do anything; and then, for he had a
musician's memory, he took paper and wrote down the music that he had
heard.

A few days later it chanced that a great lady asked him what new music
he would play before the King.

"I have decided," said the master, "to play a composition of mine
that--if one must give these things names--I shall call 'The Sylvan
Sonata'."

"Sylvan? How delightful. It represents scenes in the wood then."

The master shook his head. "Music represents nothing," he said. "Music
is music. It is not an imitation of a sylvan scene, or church bells
heard in the distance, or any other rubbish. I call this music 'The
Sylvan Sonata' merely because it has in it different phases of woodland
feeling. You understand me? It is the kind of music that might occur to
the mind of a musician when he was walking through a wood."

"But how that reminds one," said the great lady. "It was in the wood
that your favourite pupil died."

"I prefer," said the master sternly, "not to speak of that."

He preferred also not to think of it. The piano which had been
bequeathed to him was kept closed and locked now, and it was on another
instrument in another room that he prepared himself for the great
occasion. He was a fine executant, as not every composer is. He tried to
cheat himself. He said again and again to himself that what he had seen
and heard in the music-room that night was illusion. The notes had not
really moved. His brain had been over-wrought with worry and anxiety.
The music was really his own. But the attempt to cheat himself was idle,
for he knew too much of the characteristics of a promising young
composer who was now dead. No one else but him could have written that.

The evening came and the occasion found him equal to it. His playing of
"The Sylvan Sonata" was as near perfection as a man may attain. When he
had finished there were a few seconds of silence before the audience
could get back to the world again and begin their applause. And when
that had