something was going on. And he knew that out there in
a certain house on AEgydius Place something was also going on. Make no
mistake, something was up.

He saw trysts on unlighted stairways. He saw people coming to mutual
understandings by a certain pressure of the hand and adulterous signals.
That is the way they did it; that is the way Benda and Marguerite had
done it. His old hate was revived. He transferred his hate, but also his
hope, to music. Through music he was to build a bridge to Daniel and
Eleanore. He wanted to give them the advantage of his insight, his
tricks, his experience, simply in order that he might be on hand when
they committed the gruesome deed; so that he might not be cut off from
them by an impenetrable wall and be tortured in consequence by an
incorporeal jealousy; he wanted to be one with them, to feast his eye
and reach forth his empty, senescent hand.

"I am," he said to himself, "of the same flesh and blood as that man; in
me too there is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I have, to be sure," he said to
himself, "despised women, for they are despicable. But let some woman
come forward and show me that she is fit for anything more than to
increase by two or three the number of idiots with which the world is
already overcrowded, and I will do penance, whole and complete, and then
offer her my services as a knight."

He no longer slept or ate; nor could he do anything that was in any way
rational. In a belated sexual outburst, a second puberty, his
imagination became inflamed by a picture which he adorned with all the
perfections of both soul and body.

He heard that one of Daniel's works was to be played before invited
guests at the home of Baroness von Auffenberg. He wired to Eberhard, and
asked him to get him an invitation. The reply was a negative one. In his
rage he could have murdered the messenger boy. He then wrote to Daniel,
and, boasting of what he had already done for him, begged Daniel to see
to it that he was among the guests at the recital. He received a printed
card from the Baroness, on which she had expressed the hope that she
might be able to greet him on a certain day.

He was in the seventh heaven. He decided to pay Daniel a visit, and to
thank him for his kindness.

III

"The only thing to do is to leave the city, to go far, far away from
here," thought Eleanore, on that evening that was so different from any
other evening of her life.