Though it was June, he was chilled to the bone.  In the intervals between his flute-playing his teeth chattered.  He looked horribly ill, but no one had noticed that.  Men who wander about the streets with musical instruments seldom have a prosperous appearance.  Passers-by may fling them a copper if they have one handy, but otherwise they do not even look at them.  There are so many of these luckless ones, and each looks more wretched than the last.  Most of them look degraded also, but, save for his rags, this man did not.  There was a foreign air about him, but he did not look the type of foreigner that lives upon English charity.  There was nothing hang-dog about him.  He only looked exhausted and miserable.

At the suggestion of a policeman he abandoned his corner.  After all, he was doing no good there.  It was not worth a protest.  He turned and trudged up a side-street, with head bent to the rain.

It was growing late, high time to seek some shelter for the night if that were his intention.  But he pressed on aimlessly with dragging feet.  Perhaps he had not yet decided whether to perish from cold or hunger, or perhaps he regarded the choice as of small importance.  Possibly even, he had forgotten that there was a choice to be made.

The street he travelled was deserted, but he heard the buzz of a motor at a cross-road, and mechanically almost he moved towards it.  He was not quite master of himself or his sensations.  He may have vaguely remembered that there is sometimes money to be earned by opening the door of a taxi, but it was not with this definite end in view that he took his way.  For, as he went, he put his flute once more to his lips, and poured a sudden, silvery melody—­the “Aubade a la Fiancee”—­that a young French officer had onced hummed so gaily among the rocks of Valpre—­into the rain and the darkness.

It began firm and sweet as the notes of a thrush, exquisitely delicate, with the high ecstasy that only music can express.  It swelled into a positive paen of rejoicing, eager, wonderful, almost unearthly in its purity.  It ended in a confused jumble like the glittering fragments of a beautiful thing shattered to atoms at a blow.  And there fell a silence broken only by the throbbing of the taxi, and the drip, drip, drip, of the rain.

The taxi came to a stand close to the lamp-post against which the flute-player leaned, but he made no move to open the door.  The light flared on his ashen face, showing it curiously apathetic.  His instrument dangled from one nerveless hand.

A man in evening dress stepped from the taxi.  His look fell upon the wretched figure that huddled against the lamppost.  For a single instant their eyes met.  Then abruptly the new-comer wheeled to pay his fare.

“He’s in for a wet night by the looks of him,” observed the chauffeur facetiously.

“The gentleman is a friend of mine,” curtly responded the man in evening dress.