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Now Louisa was a hard woman, and often muttered and growled to herself when she turned out the room. There were days when she was in a very bad temper, so that the milk curdled in the kitchen, and the whole dinner tasted of discord, which the conductor noticed at once; for he was himself like a delicate instrument, whose soul responded to moods and influences which other people did not feel.

He concluded that Louisa had killed the rose; perhaps if she had scolded the poor thing, or knocked the glass, or breathed on the flower angrily, a treatment which it could not bear. Therefore he rang again; and when Louisa put in her head, he said, not unkindly, but more firmly than before:

“What have you done to my rose, Louisa?”

“Nothing, sir!”

“Nothing? Do you think the flower died without a very good reason? You can see for yourself that there is no water in the glass! You must have poured it away!”

As Louisa had done no such thing, she went into the kitchen and began to cry, for it is disagreeable to be blamed when one is innocent.

Conductor Crossberg, who could not bear to see people crying, said no more, but in the evening he bought a new rose, one which had only just been cut, and, of course, was not wired, for his wife had always had an objection to wired flowers.

And then he went to bed and fell asleep. And again he fancied in his sleep that the wall-paper was on fire, and that his pillow was very hot; but he went on sleeping.

On the following morning, when he came into the sitting-room, to say his morning prayers before the little altar–alas! there lay his rose, all the pink petals scattered by the side of the stem. He was just stretching out his hand to touch the bell, when he saw the photograph of his beloved, half rolled up, lying by the side of the champagne glass. Louisa could not have done that!

“She, who was my all, my conscience and my muse,” he thought in his childlike mind, “she is dissatisfied and angry with me; what have I done?”

Well, when he put this question to his conscience, he found, as usual, more than one little fault, and he resolved to eradicate his faults, gradually, of course.

Then he had the portrait framed and a glass shade put over the rose, hoping that now things would be all right, but secretly fearing that they would not.

After that he went on a week’s journey; he returned home late at night and went straight to bed. He woke up once, imagining that the hanging lamp was burning.

When he entered the sitting-room late on the following morning, it was downright hot there, and everything looked frightfully shabby. The blinds were faded; the cover on the piano had lost its bright colours; the bound volumes of music looked as if they were deformed; the oil in the hanging-lame had evaporated and hung in a trembling drop under the ornament, where the flies used to dance; the water in the water-bottle was warm.

But the saddest thing of all was that her portrait, too, was faded, as faded as autumn leaves. He was very unhappy, and whenever he was very unhappy he went to the piano, or took up his violin, as the case might be . …

This time he sat down at the piano, with a vague notion of playing the sonata in E minor, Grieg’s, of course, which had been her favourite, and was the best and finest, in his opinion, after Beethoven’s sonata in D minor; not because E comes after D, but because it was so.

But the piano was very refractory to-day. It was out of tune, and made all sorts of difficulties, so that he began to believe that his eyes and fingers were in a bad temper. But it was not their fault. The piano, quite simply, was out of tune, although a very clever tuner had only just tuned it. It was like a piano bewitched, enchanted.