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She rose from her chair and moved toward him, and as she moved, she swayed pitifully.

He did not stir.

It was I who caught her as she stumbled, and I held her close in my arms. After a moment, she relaxed a little, and her head drooped wearily on my shoulder. He lowered his lids, and I felt that every nerve in his well controlled body quivered with resentment.

He motioned to entreat her to sit down again. She shook her head, and, when he went on, again, he for the first time addressed himself directly to her. “It was chance that set you across my path last night–you and your father. I recognized him at once. I knew your mother well. I can remember the day on which you were born, I was a lad then. Your mother was one of my idols. Why, child, I fiddled for you in your cradle. At the moment I realized who you were, you were so much a part of my music that you only appealed to me through that. But when I left you, I carried a consciousness of you with me that was more tangible. I had held your hand in mine. I feel it there still.

“I went directly to my room, alone. I sat down immediately to transcribe as much of what I had played as possible while it was fresh in my mind. As I wrote I was alone with you. But as the spirit of the music was imprisoned, I knew that you were becoming more and more a material presence to me. When I slept, it was to dream of you again–but, oh, the difference!

“I should have been grateful to you for the inspiration that you had been to me–and I was! But it had served its purpose. They tell me I never played like that before. I feel I never shall again. But the end of an emotion is never in the spirit with me.

“I started out this afternoon to find you, oblivious of the fact that I should have left town. I had the audacity to tell myself that I should be a cad if I departed without thanking the sweet daughter of your mother for her share in making me great. I had the presumption to believe in myself. It seemed natural enough to your good father that ‘a whimsical genius,’ as he called me, should be allowed the caprice of even tardily looking up his boyhood’s acquaintance. He received me nobly, was proud that you should see I remembered him–and simply made no secret of it.

“Though I knew what you had seemed to me, I little realized that the child of true, fine musical spirits had a nature strung like my Strad–fine, clear, true, matchless, as well as inspiring. I spent a beautiful afternoon with you. I cannot better explain than by saying that to me it was like such a day as I have sometimes had with my violin. I call them my holy-days, and God knows I try to keep them holy,–though after too many of them follow a St. Michael and the Dragon tussle–and I mean no discredit to the Archangel, either.

“The honest old father, proud to trust his daughter to me,–in his kind heart he always considered me a most maligned man,–went off to the play and his Saturday night club. He told me that.

“We were alone together. It was then that I began to think that I could probably play on her nature as I did on my violin, and then, with a player’s frenzy, to realize that I had been doing it from the first; that we had vibrated in harmony like two ends of a chord. Then I saw no more the spirit behind her eyes. I saw only the beautiful face in which the color came and went, the burnished hair so full of golden lights, on which I longed to lay my hand–the sensitive red lips–and the angel and the demon rose up within me, and looked one another in the face, and I heard the one fling the truth at the other, which even the devil no longer cared to deny–Ah, forgive me!–“