y nod of greeting upon a colleague, a sweep of the hat on
an obsequious pupil. The crowd began to disperse and to overflow in the
surrounding streets. Some of the stragglers loitered to swell the group
that was forming round the back entrance to the building; here the
lank-haired Belgian violinist would appear, the wonders of whose
technique had sent thrills of enthusiasm through his hearers, and whose
close proximity would presently affect them in precisely the same way.
Others again made off, not for the town, with its prosaic suggestion of
work and confinement, but for the freedom of the woods that lay beyond.

Maurice Guest followed them.

It was a blowy day in early spring. Round white masses of cloud moved
lightly across a deep blue sky, and the trees, still thin and naked,
bent their heads and shook their branches, as if to elude the gambols
of a boisterous playfellow. The sun shone vividly, with restored power,
and though the clouds sometimes passed over his very face, the shadows
only lasted for a moment, and each returning radiance seemed brighter
than the one before. In the pure breath of the wind, as it gustily
swept the earth, was a promise of things vernal, of the tender beauties
of a coming spring; but there was still a keen, delightful freshness in
the air, a vague reminder of frosty starlights and serene white
snow--the untrodden snow of deserted, moon-lit streets--that quickened
the blood, and sent a craving for movement through the veins. The
people who trod the broad, clean roads and the paths of the wood walked
with a spring in their steps; voices were light and high, and each
breath that was drawn increased the sense of buoyancy, of undiluted
satisfaction. With these bursts of golden sunshine, so other than the
pallid gleamings of the winter, came a fresh impulse to life; and the
most insensible was dimly conscious how much had to be made up for, how
much lived into such a day.

Maurice Guest walked among the mossgreen tree-trunks, each of which
vied with the other in the brilliancy of its coating. He was under the
sway of a twofold intoxication: great music and a day rich in promise.
From the flood of melody that had broken over him, the frenzied storms
of applause, he had come out, not into a lamplit darkness that would
have crushed his elation back upon him and hemmed it in, but into the
spacious lightness of a fair blue day, where all that he felt could
expand, as a flower does in the sun.