Noon of the following day found Andrew once more in the Rue Boissière. He had not seen Margery from the moment when he had left her in the arbour. She had come in while the men were playing billiards, and gone directly to her room, pleading a headache, an excuse which was also made to cover her non-appearance in the morning. The two hours immediately following breakfast passed laboriously, the whole party hanging together with that kind of helpless attraction which characterizes the bubbles in a cup of tea. There was a general sense of relief when the big Panhard purred up the driveway, and Andrew, Radwalader, and Kennedy whirled off in it to Paris. Monsieur and Madame Palffy and the Listers were to follow almost immediately by train, and Mrs. Carnby was talking a continuous stream of the most unmitigated gossip.

"If I had stopped to think that in an hour they would all be gone," she told Jeremy, that night, "I would first have screamed the General Thanksgiving at the top of my lungs, and then had the vapours – whatever they may be!"

It was something the same feeling which had prompted Radwalader to remark, as they rolled away from the villa:

"I wonder if General Sherman had ever been to a house-party with the Listers when he made that remark about war."

Then, as Andrew made no reply, he relapsed into silence. He possessed that most precious gift of the Gods – the knowledge of when not to talk.

But it was when Andrew was once more alone in his familiar quarters, and had flung himself moodily into a chair, that the full force of his situation returned upon him. In twelve hours the whole world had changed. He realized for the first time that, as a matter of fact, there had never been in his mind the shadow of a doubt that the way lay clear before him, that the attainment of his wishes had been, in his calculations, no more than a matter of time. He had relied upon Margery's constancy like a mariner upon that of the North Star, and it was as if that luminary had suddenly flung away from him into some new and wholly unfamiliar constellation. The man who offers his hand in friendship and is stabbed in reply is not more aghast than was he. He was bitterly hurt, bitterly resentful. He had taken Mrs. Carnby's reprimand as something to which, if it was not wholly deserved, he had at least laid himself open: but that was a very different matter from the scornful and passionate rebuff which he had received from Margery herself. The first had almost afforded him a sense of relief. Like a child who is conscious of some slight transgression, the rebuke had seemed to set things square, to wipe out his fault, and give him absolution and a chance for a fresh start. But what followed, so wholly out of proportion to his knowledge of the truth, left him only conscious of a monstrous and unpardonable injustice. Complete innocence is never so jealous or so resentful as is the half-innocence in which lurks a hint of self-accusation, a suspicion of actual guilt. He had stood ready, with a kind of fierce and proud submission, to accept such blame as could be rightly laid at his door, but this very attitude of partial contrition flamed into anger the moment the scale was tipped too far in his disfavour. He did not see that the main factor in his revolt was the same as that in his acceptance of Mrs. Carnby's words – a sense of disloyalty, that is, to what he knew in his heart to be the true and manly course. He was very young, and moreover he had fallen, to at least an appreciable extent, from the high estate of his best ideals. Conscience impelled him to accept with humility as much of censure as he conceived that he deserved, but the savage pride of youth commanded him not to yield a single foot of ground beyond that which, by his folly, he had forfeited. He had been wrong; that he was willing to acknowledge: but his punishment had fallen too suddenly and too hard. Other men had done worse – infinitely worse – and had prospered. As for him, it was already too late to turn back. He was learning, albeit rebelliously, that standards of conduct are the boomerangs of the moral armament. The expert may juggle with them with comparative security; but the novice who recklessly flings them into space and then seeks to resume his hold upon them is apt to suffer a rude blow in the attempt. Facilis descensus– but the way of retreat is choked with briers and strewn with boulders, and never wholly retraceable.

Essentially, Andrew Vane was very clean, with an instinctive revulsion from whatever savoured of animalism or sensuality. Among a certain class of men at Harvard he had been called, for a time, "Galahad" Vane; with that impulse to sneer which is irrepressible in those who resent what they find themselves forced to respect. There was something peculiarly appropriate, however, about the name thus bestowed in ridicule: for that fine sense of nicety which is a safeguard more sure than abstract principle had held him instinctively aloof from whatever was simply sordid or unclean. Temptation of the baser sort, which left its furrows on the sand of natures less refined, washed harmlessly over the sturdy rock of his self-respect. The illicit was inseparably associated in his mind with vulgarity. To seek a pleasure which necessitated keeping one eye on the police and the other on one's purse smote him, even in suggestion, with a sickening sense of degradation. He passed by, with the sniff of a thoroughbred terrier, the carrion in which his fellows rolled.

But it was to this very fastidiousness that Mirabelle had appealed: and because she so fully satisfied it he at first misunderstood the situation utterly. It came to him clothed in a refinement, a daintiness, an atmosphere of soft lights and flowers and savoir faire et vivre which spoke eloquently to all that was sensuous in his nature, and stirred nothing of what was merely sensual. That was the French of it. The national deftness which is able to make plain women beautiful, and ordinary viands delicacies, finds its parallel in the national ability to smother the first approach of impropriety in disguises infinitely varied. And Mirabelle herself was more than content not to urge the issue. For the first time in her experience, she was unable to scent an ulterior motive in a man's admiration. She appreciated the simplicity of Andrew's attitude, without fully comprehending its significance. Back of it, no doubt, lay the as yet undeveloped progressions in a routine all too familiar: but she was grateful for the respite.

But a chance word, now and again, had stirred of late the serenity of their curious relation. He put away the thought which forced itself upon him, but it returned invariably, and each time with a suggestion of more eloquent appeal. The subtle influence of Paris, which undermines the bulwarks of principle and prejudice by insensible degrees, was at work. Daily he heard the things which he had instinctively avoided treated as inevitable and by no means unjustified accessories of life; daily the insinuating tooth of epigrammatic banter gnawed at the stability of his former convictions; while the very offences which had always repelled him by their sordid vulgarity were now accomplished all about him, light-heartedly, to the clink of crystal glasses, the soft pulse of waltz music, the ripple of laughter, and the ring of gold. All that is most lavish and most ingenious in the imaginative power and the executive ability of man had been laid under contribution to produce the effect which now enthralled his senses. None of the ordinary restrictions and limitations of life raised a finger to check this pagan prodigality of license. Economy, responsibility, and every more serious consideration stood aside from the path of sovereign pleasure. The world had given of its best with a lavish hand, for here was not only the gold to pay for, but the wit to appreciate, perfection. The labels on these cobweb-covered vintages, the dishes they enhanced, the flowers they rivalled in perfume, the music, the lights, the laughter, all spoke one language – a language forgetful of the past, heedless of the future, but eloquent as the tongue of Circe of the present joy of living. These men and women were civilization's latest work – the best, in the sense of ultra-elaboration, that the experience of the ages had enabled her to accomplish. They had been prodigally dowered with the extremes of sensuous refinement; they were clothed, fed, housed, and diverted by the ultimate attainments of human invention and skill; they demanded that life should be a festival, and every detail of existence the child of a most cunning imagination and a consummate faculty of execution: and this was the spot where was given them what they asked. The goddess of luxury, in whose ears their prayers were poured, and at whose feet their gold was piled, could do no more. They had climbed the capstone of her pyramid, her sun had touched its zenith, and her last word was said!

So, as Andrew considered his present state, he was aware of the force of Radwalader's remark that in Paris a man had something for which, instead of merely something on which, to live. Life took on a new aspect. In Boston it had been wholesome, monotonous, gray, silver, and brown: in Paris it was heady, infinitely varied, gold, purple, and rose-pink. In another of his fanciful moods, Radwalader had described it as a sapiently ordered dinner: and this, too, now that his eyes were opened, Andrew understood. There were the soups and solid courses – the architecture, history, and artistic associations of the great city: there were, by way of whetting the appetite, the clean little hors d'œuvres, radishes, anchovies, and olives – the tea-tables of the Colony, the theatres, the talks with Mrs. Carnby and the women of her set: but there were, as well, the wines and sauces piquantes– the races, the restaurants at midnight, the Allée at noon, and Mirabelle Tremonceau! The beauty and luxury of it all continually charmed his senses; the fever of it stirred hotly in his blood.

Lately, he had been conscious of noticing things about Mirabelle which had never been part of his analysis of another woman. To him, with one exception, a girl had been a face or a form, to be associated with, or brought back to memory by, a snatch of waltz-music, a perfume, or a particular effect of moonlight on water, or sunlight upon foliage. Margery Palffy was the exception, but it was not she who had taught him the faculty of observation which, of late, he had applied to her. Not from her had he learned to remark details – how the skin crinkled along her nose before a laugh came and after it had gone, how her chin cut in under sharply, and then swelled softly again before it met her throat. Now, for the first time, he was conscious that a woman is never wholly silent – that a whisper of lace or a lisp of silk speaks the movement that is unapparent to the eye. Already he had found that her frown can be mirth-provoking, and her smile of a sadness beyond description. Already he was become weatherwise in his understanding of the ripples of expression blown by the shifting winds of inner thought across her eyes. He knew when she was bored, by the barely perceptible compression of her lower lip, which told of a skilfully smothered yawn; when she was secretly amused, by the little curving line which showed for an instant on either cheek; when she was troubled or puzzled, by the tiniest contraction of her eyebrows. In his recollection dwelt such trifles as the nicking of a full instep by the edge of a slipper, the falling away of lace from a lifted wrist, the sudden swell of rounded muscles beneath the ear when the head is turned aside, and the imprint of pointed nails and the jewels of rings on the fingers of a discarded glove. If he had remembered the noses, eyes, and mouths of other women, his memory now caressed the veins in her wrists, the little wisps of hair low in her neck, the interlinking of her long lashes, the shadow from chin to ear, and the silvering touch of sunlight on the down of her averted cheek. Such things had his study of her taught him. Trifles, all! Yet does a man ever forget that woman, through his intimacy with whom these perceptions were first born, like golden threads newly discovered in the warp and woof of some familiar fabric? And that woman was Mirabelle Tremonceau.

So it was this – all this – Paris, and her luxury, charm, and infinite, bewildering appeal – with which he had merely toyed, because, at the back of his appreciation, lay ever the thought of what Margery Palffy meant to him, and what he had come to ask of her! What had been his reward? Because he had been neither one thing nor the other he was treated as the outcast he had not dared to be. He had no more than fingered the nettle, instead of grasping it boldly, like a man, and so – it had stung! He had relied, throughout, upon something which did not exist – the loyalty of those for whose sake he had striven to keep himself, in all essentials, clean. When he came to them, prepared to admit his little follies, they had slammed the gate of injustice in his face!

Of a sudden, the scene in the garden at Poissy leaped back at him, and he rose and began to pace the room. They trusted hearsay, did they? They gossiped about him, each to each, among themselves? They cast him off, as he had been a pariah, without a chance to justify himself, to give them the explanation which he had been ready to offer, but they unprepared to believe? Well, then, they should have their fill! He had tried to enter what he supposed was a friendly port, and had been torpedoed, raked fore and aft at the very haven's mouth, and sent about his business like the veriest privateer. But there were friendly harbours! There was still Radwalader – his friend! There was still Mirabelle! How ready they were to believe her guilty, between whom and himself there existed nothing but a friendship wholly pure!

Now, the curious chivalry of youth had him firmly in its grasp – the curious, unreasoning, treacherous chivalry which has not learned to discriminate as yet, but which cloaks its own essential selfishness in a fierce allegiance to the thing of the moment, blind to all larger issues, lance in rest to tilt at windmills, hotly insistent upon the immaterial present, scornful of the future, contemptuous of the past. This girl at whom they were all so eager to cast a stone, this girl who was his friend, and whose only friend he seemed to be – was it not to her that he owed his utmost loyalty, rather than to her who had so readily rejected him upon no better pretence than that of hearsay? Because others refused to grant him the confidence in his integrity which they fully owed him, was that any reason for his proving uncharitable, too? – for siding against Mirabelle and with them?

Andrew clenched his fingers savagely.

"She is my friend!" he said aloud, "my friend! As for the rest, if they want proof of my depravity, by the Lord they shall have it to the full!"

The Tempter was very near now, glorying in the preliminary moves of Vanity, his stanch ally.

The bell whirred sharply, as Andrew paced the salon to and fro, and, a moment later, his servant tapped and entered.

"Well, Jules?"

"Une dame, monsieur," announced Vicot suavely, and then – Andrew found her hand in his. There was a suggestion of challenge in her eyes as she lifted them to his, and, before she spoke, her eyebrows went up questioningly and her even white teeth nicked her lower lip.

"You're not angry?"

"Angry?" said Andrew. "Why should I be? I'm surprised, perhaps: I wasn't expecting you. But angry? – no, certainly not. I'm very pleased."

But, for the moment, there was no conviction in his tone. Her coming smote him with a vague uneasiness. It was something new, this – something for which he found himself wholly unprepared. He seemed to divine that a significant development was imminent, and that, in some sense not fully clear, his threshold was a Rubicon – which she had crossed!

In the antichambre Monsieur Vicot was scribbling his master's name and his own initials in the receipt-book of a little, domino-shaped messenger-boy. Then, as young Mercury went whistling down the stairs, he turned the blue missive over and over in his fingers.

"I'll be damned if Radwalader sees it!" he ejaculated, and thrust it in his pocket, where, for a vitally important period, it remained – forgotten!

CHAPTER XIII
RHAPSODIE HONGROISE, NO. 2

"It was a whim, if you like," said Mirabelle, a little unevenly, as she stripped off her gloves. "I hadn't seen you for four whole days, except for that little glimpse at St. Germain, and I was tired, cross, and a little lonely. So I took the chance of your being back and of finding you alone and disengaged. Perhaps, if you've nothing to do, you will let me stay to breakfast. I told Pierre that I would send down word if he was not to wait. Will you ask your man to say so?"

"Certainly."

Andrew touched the bell, gave the message, and, when Jules had gone, stood for a moment by the table fingering his letters. Mirabelle had removed her veil and hat, but was still at the mirror, touching the trifling disarrangement of her hair. Their eyes met in reflection, and suddenly both laughed. Then he went over to her side.

"It's very good to see you again," he said, but with a slight trace of embarrassment in his voice.

Mirabelle gave his shoulder a tiny pat.

"L'ami!" she said simply.

Abruptly her mood changed, and she wheeled upon him, all eager animation.

"So this is your little house, great baby! You must show me everything. It's a picnic, this: we shall be two children. Paris? Ça n'existe pas! Il n'y a que nous deux au monde!"

She perched upon the tall fender, swinging her feet, and humming a little tune.

"Oh, la vie bourgeoisé!"

Subtly her gaiety infected him, and he laughed again, this time without a hint of embarrassment. This was another Mirabelle, a Mirabelle he had not known. In some unaccountable fashion, her mood stripped her of a decade. She was, in very truth, a child, with a child's light-hearted mirth, a child's shiningly excited eyes, a child's imperious demand to be amused.

They went over the apartment together, pausing for all manner of comment. She took an almost infantile delight in bringing into prim order the chaos of neckties thrown carelessly into an upper drawer; smoothed her golden-bronze hair with his silver-backed brushes; washed her hands at his basin, and flicked the shining drops of water at him from the tips of her slender fingers. She mocked the vanity indicated by a dozen pairs of patent-leathers; tested, with a feigned shudder, the keenness of his razors; simulated a furious jealousy at the discovery of a photograph of Réjane upon his dressing-table; rummaged through the cups and plates and glasses in the vitrine; called him, whimsically, gran'père, mon oncle, and vieux garçon; laughed, frowned, scolded, teased, and petted; and was, in short, the incarnation of a gay, reckless, toi-et-moi-et-vogue-la-galère femininity.

Little by little, the charm of her humour gained upon him. To the man in whose life woman has never played a thoroughly intimate part there is something indescribably alluring in her near association with the little details of commonplace existence. Andrew was conscious that, in this independence which he had so lately learned to value, there had been lacking a something which was now, for the first time, supplied. A phrase occurred to him – "the better half." Yes, that was it – the curious inspiration with which an interested, intimately concerned woman infects such sordid items as neckties, cups and saucers. Until then, the main charm of his new manner of life had lain in its sheer independence of all save his personal inclination. Now he was suddenly aware that man's completest happiness relies upon a partial subordination; upon a certain dependence upon another, if still a kindred, point of view. As he watched Mirabelle come and go, as he heard her comments, as he felt the magnetism of her presence, he was smitten with a vast sense of loneliness – with a perception that, in reality, no man is sufficient unto himself. In this first flush of life, in this new enjoyment of Paris the alluring, he felt the need of something more. Was it Margery? Was it Mirabelle? At the moment he could not have told which, if indeed it was either. Once he risked a compliment.

"How pretty you are! It makes one want to kiss you!"

"Don't!" she said shortly. "Please don't talk like that. It spoils everything."

He drew back to look at her, puzzled, but it seemed that she avoided his eyes.

"Not – not just now," she added. "You don't understand."

Almost immediately, she was laughing and chattering again.

Then came breakfast, and – what is rare even in Paris – a breakfast perfect in its very simplicity. A bisque as smooth as velvet, sole cardinale worthy of Frédéric himself, a casserole of chicken, with a salad of celery and peppers, Burgundy tempered to an eighth of a degree, no sweets – but a compensating cup of coffee, eau de vie de Dantzic, with its flecks of shattered sunlight gleaming oddly in the clear liquid, and cigarettes, which Mirabelle refused with a moue which hinted at temptation. Andrew toasted her, across the table, with mock ceremony, in the gold-shot liqueur.

"It's like your life, l'amie," he said, squinting at the last few drops, "smooth and sweet and all spangled with sunshine and gold."

"And soon done with!" added Mirabelle lightly, turning her glass upside down upon the cloth.

She would have him take the largest and most comfortable chair by the window, while she chose the broad, flat sill at his feet. The glare of the sunlight was cut off from them by an awning, but its warmth came pleasurably through. A window-box of narcissus in full bloom breathed a perfume, as deadening as the juice of poppies, on the air. Now and again a cab rattled sharply down the incline of cobbles to the Place d'Iéna, and was blotted abruptly out of hearing on the muffling driveway of the square. For the rest, the world was very still, all distinct noises of the great and restless city being merged into one indeterminate blur of sound.

The curious instinct of silence, which so often gave the hours they spent together their especial character, fell upon them now. Once, as if some disturbing thought had startled her, Mirabelle turned suddenly and touched Andrew's hand, but her own fell back before the gesture was actually complete. The light wind stirred the hair at her temples, and the long scarf of delicate Liberty gauze which she had thrown across her shoulders, and he took up a corner of this and pleated it between his fingers for a time in silence. He was the first to speak.

"Would you care to go out – to the Exposition or the Bois? You'll be saying presently that you've had a stupid afternoon."

Mirabelle shook her head, with a faint smile, and then altered her position, drawing up her feet and linking her fingers across her knees. The change brought her close to the arm of his chair, and she looked up at him long and steadily, and then shook her head again.

"No," she answered, "I shall not say that. The Exposition? The Bois? I suppose there are such things, but I'd forgotten them. I like it here. I am happy."

With that strange new understanding of his, it was not alone her smile which he noticed, but the slow, irregular fall of her eyelids, and the deepening of a tiny shadow when the lashes rested on her cheek. An atmosphere for which he was at a loss to account seemed always to envelop him when he came into this girl's presence. He was conscious of the same not unpleasant languor which had come upon him on that first afternoon in her salon, after the return from Auteuil, but now it was not due, as then, to drowsiness. Rather, it was a blotting out of every consideration save that he was with her. America, Poissy, even Paris, humming there below them, seemed to belong to another world, and that in which he was living for the moment, to be made up of sunlight, and silence, and perfume.

"I'm almost sorry," he said presently, "that you came."

The girl made no reply. A singular change, which was not movement, seemed to stiffen and straighten her. Without actually altering, her position lost its grace, its ease, its assurance. Staring straight away before her, her eyes forgot to wink. Her whole bearing was that of an animal warned by the crackle of a trodden twig of some peril imminent and vital.

"I'm sorry you felt that you could come," continued Andrew. "I've not had much experience of life, and it's not for me to question you. But we've been good friends. I wish it could have remained that way. Young as I am, I've had disappointments – bitter ones. The people I thought I could trust – "

"Andrew!"

She had never called him by his name before. At the word, a curious little thrill stirred in him, and he closed his eyes, his mouth tightening at the corners.

"Forgive me," he added, in a whisper.

"Is it possible," said Mirabelle slowly, "that all this time you —haven't known?"

"I've tried not to know," he answered. "I've tried not to listen to what people said. It has all been so different from anything like that. You've been like the girls I know in my own country, like a comrade, like a chum. I've tried to keep myself from thinking of you in any other light. I've always been glad to be with you: yes, and I'm glad to have you with me now. And yet – I know that we shall both be sorry for this. To-morrow – "

"To-morrow!"

Misunderstanding, she turned to him, and slipped her hand into his. A moment she hesitated, and then bowed her face against his arm.

"Then you do know!" she continued. "Ah, my friend, I have hoped that it would not come to this."

Her voice had suddenly gone wistful. She was the child again, but the child hurt, penitent, and near to tears.

"Believe me, l'ami, I hoped it would not come to this. I'm so careless, Andrew. I don't think – I forget. You see, we are different, nous autres. What are little things to other women are great things to us, and what are great things to them – "

Then she looked into his eyes. Almost unconsciously, her fingers touched his arm.

"I wish I could make you understand," she added. "Even with me, there is only one thing that can justify – "

She paused for a breath, with a gesture toward the open window.

"It was to get away from all that that I came – to forget – to be alone with you – just we together – two children – to have something different. I'm so tired of it all, Andrew – and – there has never been any one like you. I didn't think what it would mean. Ah, my friend – "

She sank back upon the cushion, with a little sigh.

Suddenly Andrew's heart contracted, seemed to mount into his throat, and, repulsed, beat wildly against the bars of its prison. He felt the tremor of its pulsing in his wrists, in his temples, in his ears. He knew that he was colouring deeply. He strove to tighten his lips, but they parted in spite of him, and the breath shot through with a little hiss. Then he came to himself, and saw that the girl's eyes had closed, and that her hand on the arm of the chair had gripped the silken scarf. Folds of it, sharpened to the thinness of paper, came out between her fingers, and her knuckles showed like little bosses of tinted ivory through the pink flesh.

What was it? The hand of a passing spirit, wholly unfamiliar, had touched him; a voice never heard before had whispered something in his ear. What was it – what was this thing which he understood and did not understand? Bending slightly forward, he looked down through the ironwork railing at the street below. A solitary cab leaned maudlinly over the kerb, the driver slewed around in his seat, with his elbow on the roof, and his varnished hat on the back of his head, reading a newspaper; and the horse nodding, with his nose in a feed-bag. Two children were marching resolutely, hand in hand and out of step, their nurses following, with the gay plaid ribbons of their caps flapping about their hips. The pipe of an itinerant plumber whined and squeaked unmelodiously, and the horn of a passing automobile hiccoughed in the distance. Inconsequently there came to Andrew the memory of a sudden awakening from a nap on the beach at Newport. For a moment, everything in sight – people, houses, boats, the sand, the sunlight, and the sea – had been garbed in startling unreality, in a new, strange light.

The restlessness of a curious dissatisfaction suddenly laid hold upon him, and he rose and began to pace the salon once more. He would have given something to fling himself out of the chaos of conflicting thoughts which beset him, to ride, for example, five miles at a gallop, as he had been wont to do at Beverly, with the wind tearing at his hair and a thoroughbred lunging between his knees.

Presently he became aware that Mirabelle was watching him curiously, and was puzzled to find that for the first time he was not ready to meet her eyes. He seated himself at the piano, and for a moment fingered the music on the rack, without actually taking in the title – "Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2." Then he smiled, with a little nod as if he had been greeting an acquaintance on the street, and his hands fell upon the keys.

Majestically, with ponderous bass notes and a deeper comment of short, staccato chords, the Rhapsodie began. It was as solemn as a dirge in its adagio movement, till the high treble began to flutter into the motif, and dragged it upward, with a brilliant run, into a suggestion of running water. Plunging again into the bass, the music marched firmly on, varied with higher chords, until, through the monotonous throb, a bird chirped, twittered, and trilled, and cadenza followed cadenza, plashing in and over the main theme. This variation was presently gone again in a swiftly descending arpeggio, and the adagio reasserted itself, beating out across the salon with the lingering quality of tolled bells, freeing itself at last by another run into the crystal sparkle of the treble, where the motif was repeated, ringing with fresh vigour. The bass replied with a brief word now and again, correcting the new rendering of the air that it had taught, or patiently repeating a whole phrase. But, petulantly, the treble threw off the sombre spirit of what had gone before. Again it thrilled with bird-music, and ran into the gay babble of brooks, punctuated rarely by a deeper chord, as if the water swerved round a stone, and slid, murmuring, across a level, before swinging again down a shelving reach. But, almost immediately, a new element stole in – a tremulous flutter of one note, potently suggestive of mad music to follow. Faster – faster! The flutter was interrupted by a dripping of stray notes, an octave lower, dotted, presently, with a tiny tinkling above. Then, without warning, the whole plunged into a mad vivace movement, that galloped like a living thing, was interrupted by whimsically coupled notes, gabbling up and down, and then seemed to lengthen and bound forward as if it had been spurred. There was a thunder of chromatics – hoofs pounding on a long bridge – then the tinkle of water broke in again – right at his elbow – lingered briefly, and was gone, and the hoofs were thudding on a muffling stretch of soft road. The suggestion, at first merely a fancy, grew upon him as he played. This was the gallop of which he had felt a need! He could almost see the wiry mare snapping in the wind, smell the horse and the saddle, and hear the stirrup-leathers squeaking against his boots. In spirit, at least, he put into the music the exultation, which is near to delirium, of a ride at nightfall or at dawn. The earth, which never sighs save when falling asleep or waking, sighs then, and her breath is sweet. Scents and sounds step to the roadside, and are gone again in a moment. The wind whips and whistles. And the triplicate hoof-beats pound, pound, pound out of life all that is stale, morbid, and unclean, so that it becomes a crystal dome inverted on a perfume-breathing garden, and one man whirling through space like a god, with a laugh on his lips!