There was no question about it any more: the
whole audience knew that they were listening to a master. In the row
immediately behind Michael's party were sitting Sylvia and her mother,
who had not quite been torn away from her novels, since she had sought
"The Love of Hermione Hogarth" underneath her cloak, and read it
furtively in pauses. They had come in after Michael, and until the
interval between the classical and the modern section of the concert he
was unaware of their presence; then idly turning round to look at the
crowded hall, he found himself face to face with the girl.

"I had no idea you were there," he said. "Hermann will do, won't he? I
think--"

And then suddenly the words of commonplace failed him, and he looked at
her in silence.

"I knew you were back," she said. "Hermann told me about--everything."

Michael glanced sideways, indicating his mother, who sat next him, and
was talking to Barbara.

"I wondered whether perhaps you would come and see my mother and me," he
said. "May I write?"

She looked at him with the friendliness of her smiling eyes and her
grave mouth.

"Is it necessary to ask?" she said.

Michael turned back to his seat, for his mother had had quite enough of
her sister-in-law, and wanted him again. She looked over her shoulder
for a moment to see whom Michael was talking to.

"I'm enjoying my concert, dear," she said. "And who is that nice young
lady? Is she a friend of yours?"

The interval was over, and Hermann returned to the platform, and waiting
for a moment for the buzz of conversation to die down, gave out,
without any preliminary excursion on the keys, the text of Michael's
"Variations." Then he began to tell them, with light and flying fingers,
what that simple tune had suggested to Michael, how he imagined himself
looking on at an old-fashioned dance, and while the dancers moved to
the graceful measure of a minuet, or daintily in a gavotte, the tune of
"Good King Wenceslas" still rang in his head, or, how in the joy of
the sunlight of a spring morning it still haunted him. It lay behind
a cascade of foaming waters that, leaping, roared into a ravine; it
marched with flying banners on some day of victorious entry, it watched
a funeral procession wind by, with tapers and the smell of incense; it
heard, as it got nearer back to itself again, the peals of Christmas
bells, and stood forth again in its own person, decorated and
emblazoned.

Hermann had already cap