the faded untidy air as he had never noted it before,
wondering why a man should bury himself in such a hole as this. Was one
now, he speculated, to look at everybody all over again? He was not the
kind of man, Ganz, to interest the Guy Matthews who had gone to Dizful.
But it was the Guy Matthews who came back from Dizful who didn't like
Ganz's name or Ganz's good enough accent. Nevertheless he yielded to
Ganz's insistence, when they reached the office and the money-bag had
been restored to its normal portliness, that the traveler should step
into the house to rest and cool off.

"Do come!" urged the Swiss. "I so seldom see a civilized being. And I
have a new piano!" he threw in as an added inducement. "Do you play?"

He had no parlor tricks, he told Ganz, and he told himself that he
wanted to get on. But Ganz had been very decent to him, after all. And
he began to perceive that he himself was extremely tired. So he followed
Ganz through the cloister of the pool to the court where the great basin
glittered in the sun, below the pillared portico.

"Who is that?" exclaimed Ganz suddenly. "What a tone, eh? And what a
touch!"

Matthews heard from Ganz's private quarters a welling of music so
different from the pipes and cow-horns of Dizful that it gave him a
sudden stab of homesickness.

"I say," he said, brightening, "could it be any of the fellows from
Meidan-i-Naft?"

The ambiguous blue eye brightened too.

"Perhaps! It is the river music from _Rheingold_. But listen," Ganz
added with a smile. "There are sharks among the Rhine maidens!"

They went on, up the steps of the portico, to the door which Ganz opened
softly, stepping aside for his visitor to pass in. The room was so dark,
after the blinding light of the court, that Matthews saw nothing at
first. He stepped forward eagerly, feeling his way among Ganz's tables
and chairs toward the end of the room from which the music came. They
gave him, the cluttering tables and chairs, after the empty rooms he had
been living in, a sharper renewal of his stab. And even a piano--! It
made him think of Kipling and the _Song of the Banjo_:

"I am memory and torment--I am Town!
I am all that ever went with evening dress!"

But what mute inglorious Paderewski of the restricted circle he had
moved in for the past months was capable of such parlor tricks as this?
Then, suddenly, he saw. He saw, swaying back and forth against the dark
background of the piano, a dome