pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight
convicted him in the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded
rustic. In the presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to
be any such thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than
did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely
accumulating their spell upon him.

"It is all singing!" the player called out to him over her shoulder, in
a minute of rest. "That is what Chopin does--he sings!"

She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth
Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in
particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind
itself into sequence. Then it came closer to him than the others had
done. The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed
and inspired him. He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the
RUBATO license--the privilege to invest each measure with the stress of
the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will--and the music
she made spoke to him as with a human voice. There was the wooing sense
of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous
eyes, and then--

"You know this part, of course," he heard her say.

On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden,
where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral. A sombre and lofty
anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified
pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and
authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to
his feet. He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all
that one should kneel to hear such music.

"This you'll know too--the funeral march from the Second Sonata," she
was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come. He
sank upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight
around his knees. His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird,
mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in
the bondage of an orderly sadness. There was a propelling motion in
the thing--a sense of being borne bodily along--which affected him
like dizziness. He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern,
vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn
breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced for the sweet,
comforting s