s; because she stirred him more
than anything she did could adequately explain.

One afternoon Harsanyi, after the lesson, was standing by the window
putting some collodion on a cracked finger, and Thea was at the piano
trying over "Die Lorelei" which he had given her last week to practice.
It was scarcely a song which a singing master would have given her, but
he had his own reasons. How she sang it mattered only to him and to her.
He was playing his own game now, without interference; he suspected that
he could not do so always.

When she finished the song, she looked back over her shoulder at him and
spoke thoughtfully. "That wasn't right, at the end, was it?"

"No, that should be an open, flowing tone, something like this,"--he
waved his fingers rapidly in the air. "You get the idea?"

"No, I don't. Seems a queer ending, after the rest."

Harsanyi corked his little bottle and dropped it into the pocket of his
velvet coat. "Why so? Shipwrecks come and go, MARCHEN come and go, but
the river keeps right on. There you have your open, flowing tone."

Thea looked intently at the music. "I see," she said dully. "Oh, I see!"
she repeated quickly and turned to him a glowing countenance. "It is the
river.--Oh, yes, I get it now!" She looked at him but long enough to
catch his glance, then turned to the piano again. Harsanyi was never
quite sure where the light came from when her face suddenly flashed out
at him in that way. Her eyes were too small to account for it, though
they glittered like green ice in the sun. At such moments her hair was
yellower, her skin whiter, her cheeks pinker, as if a lamp had suddenly
been turned up inside of her. She went at the song again:

"ICH WEISS NICHT, WAS SOLL ES BEDEUTEN, DAS ICH SO TRAURIG BIN."

A kind of happiness vibrated in her voice. Harsanyi noticed how much and
how unhesitatingly she changed her delivery of the whole song, the first
part as well as the last. He had often noticed that she could not think
a thing out in passages. Until she saw it as a whole, she wandered like
a blind man surrounded by torments. After she once had her "revelation,"
after she got the idea that to her--not always to him--explained
everything, then she went forward rapidly. But she was not always easy
to help. She was sometimes impervious to suggestion; she would stare at
him as if she were deaf and ignore everything he told her to do. Then,
all at once, something would happen in her brain a