“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!—­”

In his egoism of self-analysis and open confession, I am sure he did not realize how far he was going, until she buried her face in her hands.

Then he stepped across the room and stood before me as she rested her face in her hands against my breast.

“It was not especially clever—­the last struggle against myself.  I had never known such a woman before.  I suppose if I had, I should have tortured her to death to strike new chords out of her nature,—­and wept at my work!  I had not the courage to tear myself abruptly away.  I suggested an hour of the opera—­I gave her the public as a protector—­and they sang ‘Faust.’  It was then that, knowing myself so well, I looked out into the auditorium and saw you!  It was Providence that put you in my way.  I thought it was accident.  I am sure I need say no more?”

I shook my head.

He leaned over her a moment.  He gently took her hands from her face.  Her eyelids trembled.  For one brief moment she opened her eyes to his.

“You have given me one sweet day,” he murmured.  “Some part of your soul has called its music out of mine.  That offspring of a miraculous sympathy will live immortal when all else of our two lives is forgotten.  Remember to-day as a dream—­and me as a shadow there—­” he stopped abruptly.  I felt her head fall forward.  She had swooned.

Together we looked into the beautiful colorless face.

I loved music as I loved light.  I was an artist myself.  A great musician—­and this man was one—­was to me the greatest achievement of Art and Living.