in a factory yard who suddenly hears a blackbird singing. It gave him a moment of exquisite pain. He stood with quivering throat, and a sense of strange and deep emotion stirring in him.
The pianist was playing Chopin. He or she was in the midst of the First Prelude when Sorrell first paused to listen. Then came the Berceuse, and after the Étude in A Flat. Sorrell, leaning against the wall, felt his memories going back to the days of his youth when he had sat and dreamed in Queen's Hall. Romance. Those days when he had imagined
But who was the pianist? A car with two or three women in it had arrived an hour ago, and Sorrell had carried up their luggage, but these ladies had suggested rag-time rather than Chopin. He felt curious. He approached the drawing-room door, telling himself that it would be easy for him to enter the room as though in search of some visitor. He could wait for an interlude.
Leaning against the wall opposite the door, he let the surge of those sweet sounds go through him. A pause came. He was about to slip across the passage when the door opened.
It was Mr. Roland who opened the door. His face had a kind of radiance, a happy rapture.
"Hallo!"
Sorrell had straightened up.
"Sorry, sir. I was listening. Was it you?"
"Yes."
The two men looked at each other, and the light on Thomas Roland's face seemed to have spread to Sorrell's. They were together for a moment in a transcendental world of mystic sounds and symbols. And life was drawing them nearer.
