the soft upholstery of the chair. In a mirror he saw a reflection of his face—a flushed ivory setting for two black jewels. That very morning he had seen a paragraph in the Paris edition of an American newspaper stating that Miss Gritty Kestrell had arrived at the Ritz for a visit of some weeks, and he could not go to her, for he was unwilling to subject her to the shock of his emaciation.
Within him, beneath a little singing restlessness of nerves, there was a deep tranquillity.
Monsieur was speaking of music. It was time to drag oneself from the chair. He marvelled that a body so thin could be so heavy. Monsieur was asking him to play the organ for a change. If Monsieur only knew how fatiguing the pedals were, how hard one had to press down the keys!
Once seated on the bench, Paul's energies rallied. He played a Pastorale of César Franck's—a thing of quiet, gentle, austere beauty, reflecting a loftiness of spirit, a sincerity and nobility that refreshed and inspired.
Although he had drawn away from it at intervals, music still expressed some truth he had always sought in books and in life itself yet never quite attained. It was strangely satisfying, yet it stirred a longing for fuller revelation.
From Franck he went back to older masters, and found himself playing Bach fughettas he had not heard since childhood. Once more he was the small boy performing his solo while the pennies fell with a chink into baize-lined mahogany plates. Once more he was playing for Phœbe Meddar—not the ladylike schoolmistress, but a pale blue, pale pink, pale gold and lavender Princess of Alcantara who knew no language but the ethereal language he made for her with his music. Once more he identified his life with the melody—he was the voice which rose yearningly above the complexity of opposing
