ich he dealt with haunted them as a sort of unseen
presence. It moved in a tiny gavotte, or looked on at a minuet measure;
it wailed, yet without being positively heard, in a little dirge of
itself; it broadened into a march, it shouted in a bravura of rapid
octaves, and finally asserted itself, heard once more, over a great
scale base of bells.

Falbe, as was his habit when interested, sat absolutely still, but
receptive and alert, instead of jerking and fidgeting as he had done
over Michael's fiasco in the Chopin prelude, and at the end he jumped up
with a certain excitement.

"Do you know what you've done?" he said. "You've done something that's
really good. Faults? Yes, millions; but there's a first-rate imagination
at the bottom of it. How did it happen?"

Michael flushed with pleasure.

"Oh, they sang themselves," he said, "and I learned them. But will it
really do? Is there anything in it?"

"Yes, old boy, there's King Wenceslas in it, and you've dressed him up
well. Play that last one again."

The last one was taxing to the fingers, but Michael's big hands banged
out the octave scale in the bass with wonderful ease, and Falbe gave a
great guffaw of pleasure at the rollicking conclusion.

"Write them all down," he said, "and try if you can hear it singing half
a dozen more. If you can, write them down also, and give me leave to
play the lot at my concert in January."

Michael gasped.

"You don't mean that?" he said.

"Certainly I do. It's a fine bit of stuff."

It was with these variations, now on the point of completion that
Michael meant to spend his solitary and rapturous evening. The spirits
of the air--whatever those melodious sprites may be--had for the last
month made themselves very audible to him, and the half-dozen further
variations that Hermann had demanded had rung all day in his head. Now,
as they neared completion, he found that they ceased their singing;
their work of dictation was done; he had to this extent expressed
himself, and they haunted him no longer. At present he had but jotted
down the skeleton of bars that could be filled in afterwards, and it
gave him enormous pleasure to see the roles reversed and himself out of
his own brain, setting Falbe his task.

But he felt much more than this. He had done something. Michael, the
dumb, awkward Michael, was somehow revealed on those eight pages of
music. All his twenty-five years he had stood wistfully inarticulate,
unable, so it