elf-restrained, brief, uneventful as it was,
proved more momentous to both man and woman than either, beforehand,
would have dreamed possible. Their early passion for each other both
believed to lie buried deep beneath the weight of years of separation
and difference of occupation and environment. Vanity! The first hour of
real reunion showed them both that the old feeling had been far from
dead: was, in truth, sleeping so lightly that a touch must rouse it
again. Four hours after Nathalie's departure, Ivan found himself at the
piano, pouring out his heart in such a burden of passionate melody as
had rarely rushed from him, even in his moments of inspiration. And the
long hours of the sleepless night served absolutely to loosen the
fetters of his self-repression; for in the growing glory of the dawn, he
watched also the glorious resurrection of the one great love of his
life. Again, after many years, she lived in him: in every thought and
hope and dream; not now as a child, potent, through ignorance, to wound
him past endurance; but as a woman, beautiful through time and sorrow,
magnificent in the wreck of her woman's life. Still he knew well that
if love was to be his, it must remain for a long time under the guise of
friendship. What he did not acknowledge to himself, was the fact that
all the world was to share something of this great and painful joy. He
was still ruthless in the service of his single god. And this love, like
every other factor of his life, must serve as food for his genius. It
was Nathalie who had unconsciously turned him, protesting, to his work.
It was to be through her also that he reached the height of his career:
his perfection of maturity. For she was the inspiration of the "Tosca
Symphony."

If Ivan had suddenly risen from the depths to the heights, the cause of
his change was also to know powerful emotion on his behalf. In the days
of her far-away youth, Nathalie Dravikine's affection for her cousin had
been as strong as any her school-girl nature was capable of. But when,
after her hurried and loveless marriage, she was forced into, a
revulsion of exquisite misery to a breadth of pain and repression that
forced her naturally light nature into incredible development, the
comparatively petty grief of Ivan's loss was forgotten. News of his
disgrace reached her months after the fact, and but a few weeks before
the birth of her first child,--now long since dead. And in her then
morbid and unnatu