me think it wasn't.
. . . You got quite a good tone out of it."

He paused a moment, again striking the dumb note, as if to make sure
that it was soundless.

"Yes; I'll teach you," he said. "All the technique you have got, you
know, is wrong from beginning to end, and you mustn't mind unlearning
all that. But you've got the thing that matters."

All this stewed and seethed in Michael's mind as he sat that night by
the window looking out on to the silent and empty street. His thoughts
flowed without check or guide from his will, wandering wherever their
course happened to take them, now lingering, like the water of a river
in some deep, still pool, when he thought of the friendship that
had come into his life, now excitedly plunging down the foam of
swift-flowing rapids in the exhilaration of his newly-found liberty,
now proceeding with steady current at the thought of the weeks of
unremitting industry at a beloved task that lay in front of him. He
could form no definite image out of these which should represent his
ordinary day; it was all lost in a bright haze through which its shape
was but faintly discernible; but life lay in front of him with promise,
a thing to be embraced and greeted with welcome and eager hands, instead
of being a mere marsh through which he had to plod with labouring steps,
a business to be gone about without joy and without conviction in its
being worth while.

He wondered for a moment, as he rose to go to bed, what his feelings
would have been if, at the end of his performance on the sore-throated
and voiceless piano, Falbe had said: "I'm sorry, but I can't do anything
with you." As he knew, Falbe intended for the future only to take a few
pupils, and chiefly devote himself to his own practice with a view to
emerging as a concert-giver the next winter; and as Michael had sat
down, he remembered telling himself that there was really not the
slightest chance of his friend accepting him as a pupil. He did not
intend that this rejection should make the smallest difference to his
aim, but he knew that he would start his work under the tremendous
handicap of Falbe not believing that he had it in him to play, and under
the disappointment of not enjoying the added intimacy which work with
and for Falbe would give him. Then he had engaged in this tussle with
refractory notes till he quite lost himself in what he was playing,
and thought no more either of Falbe or the piano, but only of what the