when there had been a lull in the chorus and the world had held its breath, his solo had welled up clear, spontaneous, full, until he had throbbed with the conviction that it dominated the universe. But almost immediately other voices had risen to drown it.
Even the theme of the third movement of the old sonata—a theme he had once identified with his own ego—was only musically and poetically valid. At any rate valid only for a Beethoven, never for a Paul Minas.
He closed the piano, went to sit by the fire, and lit a final cigarette. He thought of his haphazard acquaintances and what they were making of their lives. He wondered, once more, what would have become of him had he never run away to sea. Suddenly he yearned to see the village where he had lived as a child, yearned to revisit the old kitchen, the old playroom, and the fields where he and Gritty had looked for moss-beds they called "secrets." In the firelight he recaptured the old sights and sounds, heard the skates clinking on his shoulder and voices echoing across the frosty marsh. He saw the cherry-tree white with snow, and again white with blossoms. He heard Walter Dreer's familiar whistle and felt his heart beat faster at its summons—a summons he couldn't accept, because he had to practise. He saw Phœbe Meddar standing in the pale morning sun, ivory and gold and lavender, saw her stoop to pick up a bunch of tea-roses. And he yearned to see Phœbe again, the Phœbe whom Gritty had found—on one of her triumphal re-entries into Hale's Turning—teaching school. For his idealization of Phœbe, Gritty had mocked him a little, but tenderly. "At least," she had admitted, "Phœbe's the only girl left in that God-forsaken hole with a nickel's worth of brains."
Gritty had turned up as a sort of "distant" sister. She had shown a disposition to mother rather than flirt with him, which was as it should be. And now she was up-
