lays a horn. He plays an old air--ever so old--we call it
the 'Heynal,' on the top of one of the towers. The only time I was ever
in Cracow I heard a man at a concert--a magnificent player--improvise on
it. And it comes into one of Chopin's sonatas."

He began to hum under his breath a sweet wandering melody. And suddenly
he sprang up, and ran to the piano. He played the air with his left
hand, embroidering it with delicate arabesques and variations, catching
a bass here and there with a flying touch, suggesting marvellously what
had once been a rich and complete whole. The injured hand, which had
that day been very painful, lay helpless in its sling; the other
flashed over the piano, while the boy's blue eyes shone beneath his
vivid frieze of hair. Falloden, lying back in his chair, noticed the
emaciation of the face, the hollow eyes, the contracted shoulders; and
as he did so, he thought of the scene in the Magdalen ballroom--the
slender girl, wreathed in pearls, and the brilliant foreign
youth--dancing, dancing, with all the eyes of the room upon them.

Presently, with a sound of impatience, Radowitz left the piano. He could
do nothing that he wanted to do. He stood at the window for some minutes
looking out at the autumn moon, with his back to Falloden.

Falloden took up one of the books he was at work on for his fellowship
exam. When Radowitz came back to the fire, however, white and shivering,
he laid it down again, and once more made conversation. Radowitz was at
first unwilling to respond. But he was by nature _bavard_, and Falloden
played him with some skill.

Very soon he was talking fast and brilliantly again, about his artistic
life in Paris, his friends at the Conservatoire or in the Quartier
Latin; and so back to his childish days in Poland, and the uprising in
which the family estates near Warsaw had been forfeited. Falloden found
it all very strange. The seething, artistic, revolutionary world which
had produced Otto was wholly foreign to him; and this patriotic passion
for a dead country seemed to his English common sense a waste of force.
But in Otto's eyes Poland was not dead; the White Eagle, torn and
blood-stained though she was, would mount the heavens again; and in
those dark skies the stars were already rising!

At eleven, Falloden got up--

"I must go and swat. It was awfully jolly, what you've been telling me.
I know a lot I didn't know before."

A gleam of pleasure showed in the boy's s