ndkerchief, adjusted the
distance of his seat, threw back his head, and half closing his eyes,
began to play. Except for the unsteady flickerings cast on the wall by
a street-lamp, the room was soon in darkness.

Maurice resumed his seat reluctantly. He had been dragged upstairs
against his will; and throughout the foregoing scene, had sat an
uncomfortable spectator. He had as little desire for the girl to return
and find him there, as for Krafft to play to him. But no excuse for
leaving offered itself, and each moment made it harder to interrupt the
player, who had promptly forgotten the fact of his presence.

After he had listened for a time, however, Maurice ceased to think of
escaping. Madeleine had once alluded to Krafft's skill as an
interpreter of Chopin, but, all the same, he had not expected anything
like what he now heard, and at first he could not make anything of it.
He had hitherto only known Chopin's music as played in the sentimental
fashion of the English drawing-room. Here, now, came some one who made
it clear that, no matter how pessimistic it appeared on the surface,
this music was, at its core an essentially masculine music; it kicked
desperately against the pricks of existence; what failed it was only
the last philosophic calm. He could not, of course, know that various
small things had combined to throw the player into one of his most
prodigal moods: the rescue and taming of the cat, the passage-at-arms
with Avery, her stimulating forbiddal, and, last and best, the one
silent listener in the dark--this stranger, picked up at random in the
streets, who had never yet heard him play, and to whom he might reveal
himself with an indecency that friendship precluded.

When at length, Frau Schulz entered, in her bed-jacket, to say that it
was long past ten o'clock, Krafft wakened as if out of a trance, and
hid his eyes from the light. Frau Schulz, a robust person, disregarded
his protests, and herself locked the piano and took the key.

"She makes me promise to," she whispered to Maurice, pointing over her
shoulder at an imaginary person. "If I didn't, he'd go on all night.
He's no more fit to look after himself than a baby--and he gets it
again with his boots in the morning.--Yes, yes, call me names if it
pleases you. Names don't kill. And if I am a hag, you're a rascal,
that's what you are! The way you treat that poor, good creature makes
one's blood boil."

Krafft waved her away, and opening the wi