over-dressed people who came empty
and left untransformed. It all seemed to him like a lie. He desisted; he
threw it all overboard just as the temptation was strongest, just as the
Berlin Philharmonic invited him to give a concert of his own works in
its hall.

He had suddenly disappeared. In less than three months his name had
become a saga.

VI

He spent the summer, autumn, and winter of 1893 wandering around. Now he
was in a remote Thuringian village, now in some town in the Rhoen region,
now in the mountains of Saxony, now in a fishing village on the Baltic.
Throughout the day he worked on his manuscripts, in the evening he
composed. No one except the members of the firm of Philander and Sons
knew where he was. He did not dare hide himself from the people who were
sending him the cheque at the end of the month.

He gradually became so unaccustomed to talking that it was only with
difficulty that he could ask a hotel-keeper about the price of his room.
This unrelieved silence chiselled his lips into ghastly sharpness.

He never heard from his mother or his children. He seemed to have
forgotten that there were human beings living who thought of him with
affection and anxiety.

The only messages he received from the world were letters that were
forwarded to him at intervals of from four to five weeks by the musical
firm in Mayence. These letters were written by Regina Sussmann, though
they were not signed in her name: the signature at the close of each one
was "The Swallow." She addressed Daniel by the familiar _Du_, and not by
the more conventional and polite _Sie_.

She told him of her life, wrote of the books she had read, the people
she had met, and gave him her views on music. Her communications became
in time indispensable to him; he was touched by her fidelity; he was
pleased that she did not use her own name. She had a remarkable finesse
and power of expression, and however ungenuine and artificial she may
have appealed to him in personal association, everything she wrote
seemed to him to be natural and convincing. She never expressed a wish
that he do something impossible and never uttered a complaint. On the
other hand, there was a passion of the intelligence about her that was
quite new to him; she was unlike the women he had known. And there was a
fervour and certainty in her appreciation of his being before which he
bowed as at the sound of a higher voice.

Th