Musa also had declined dinner, but he had done nothing to indicate that he meant to leave.  He sat mournful and passive in a basket chair, his sling making a patch of white in the gloom.  The truth was that he suffered from a disability not uncommon among certain natures:  he did not know how to go.  He could arrive with ease, but he was no expert at vanishing.  Audrey was troubled.  As suited her age and condition, she was apt to feel the responsibility of the whole universe.  She knew that she was responsible for Musa’s accident, and now she was beginning to be aware that she was responsible for his future as well.  She was sure that he needed encouragement and guidance.  She pictured him with his fiddle under his chin, masterful, confident, miraculous, throwing a spell over everyone within earshot.  But actually she saw him listless and vanquished in the basket chair, and she perceived that only a strongly influential and determined woman, such as herself, could save him from disaster.  No man could do it.  His tears had shaken her.  She was willing to make allowances for a foreigner, but she had never seen a man cry before, and the spectacle was very disturbing.  It inspired her with a fear that even she could not be the salvation of Musa.

“I demanded something of you,” she said, after lowering the wick of the lamp to exactly the right point, and staring at it for a greater length of time than was necessary or even seemly.  She spoke French, and as she listened to her French accent she heard that it was good.

“I am done for!” came the mournful voice of Musa out of the obscurity behind the lamp.

“What!  You are done for?  But you know what the doctor said.  He said no bone was broken.  Only a little strain, and the pain from your——­” Admirable though her French accent was, she could not think of the French word for “funny-bone.”  Indeed she had never learnt it.  So she said it in English.  Musa knew not what she meant, and thus a slight chasm was opened between them which neither could bridge.  She finished:  “In one week you are going to be able to play again.”

Musa shook his head.

Relieved as she was to discover that Musa had cried because he was done for, and not because he was hurt, she was still worried by his want of elasticity, of resiliency.  Nevertheless she was agreeably worried.  The doctor had disappointed her by his light optimism, but he could not smile away Musa’s moral indisposition.  The large vagueness of the studio, the very faint twilight still showing through the great window, the silence and intimacy, the sounds of the French language, the gleam of the white sling, all combined to permeate her with delicious melancholy.  And not for everlasting bliss would she have had Musa strong, obstinate, and certain of success.

“A week!” he murmured.  “It is for ever.  A week of practice lost is eternally lost.  And on Wednesday one had invited me to play at Foa’s.  And I cannot.”