move your
jacket and hat, and walk up and down the room several times?"

Katrine obeyed.

"Good!" he said, at the first turn; and at the last, "_Very_ good!
Sing," he said, as abruptly as he had issued his former order.

In the after years she was given to making light of her choice, but the
command was scarcely spoken before she began, in her lovely, sonorous
voice, the song which it was her heritage to sing well:

"'Tis the most distressful country that ever I have seen,
They're hanging men and women there for wearing of the green."

As she sang the three great stanzas, Josef stood motionless, his lips
drawn, his eyes half shut, his face like a wooden man's; but his hands
trembled, and as she ended her singing he opened the piano and seated
himself in front of it. "Take the notes I strike," he said,
"little--very little--so--so--so!" he sang.

Up and down, over and over, listening with his head turned to one side
like a dog, he had her sing the tones, saying only, "Once more!" and
"yet again!" and "over--over--over!" At last, with a sigh, he closed the
instrument. "I am not one given to extravagance in language," he said,
"but you have the greatest _natural_ voice I have ever heard. It is
almost placed. Sit down a minute, I want to talk to you. Two kinds of
pupils I have had in my life: those with voice and no temperament, and
those with temperament and no voice. God seldom gives both; if He does,
it is the great artist that may be made. To be great one must have both.
But even with both given, one must have the ability to work, to work
like a galley-slave, to work when all the world is resting, at the dead
of night, in the small hours of the morning. When all the others have
let go, you must hold on, till your head is tired and your body aches
and you faint by the wayside; but you must never let go, you must learn
to endure to the end. You will understand me. It is the _mental_ part of
which I speak. I do not mean that you are to wear your voice or your
body out practising. It's something far harder. You must learn to
surrender yourself, to lose your life to have it!" He looked at her
keenly. She was drinking his words in, as it were, and the expression on
her face assured even him. "Do you want me," he said, suddenly coming
nearer, "to tell you about yourself; what I see in you?"

She bent her head, quivering from head to foot, before the power of this
man, who seemed uncanny in his knowledge.

"You