In the long programme of selected airs he remembered that there was one which would give him this chance to speak, in the playing of which he could put all his skill and all his soul, an air which carried with it infinite sadness and the touch of a caress.  The other numbers on the programme had been chosen to please the patrons of a restaurant, this one, La Lettre d’Amour, was included in the list for his own satisfaction.  He had put it there to please himself; to-night he would play it to please her—­to this unknown girl who had so suddenly awakened and inspired him.

As he waited for this chance to come he watched her, noting her every movement, her troubled smile, her air of being apart and above her surroundings.  He noticed, too, the set face of the young man at her side and, with the discernment of one whose own interest is captive, saw the half-concealed longing in his eyes.  He felt a quick antipathy to this young man.  His assured position at the girl’s side accentuated how far he himself was removed from her; he resented also the manner of the young man to the waiters, and he wondered hotly if, in the mind of this favored youth, the musician who played for his entertainment was regarded any more highly than the servant who received his orders.  To this feeling of resentment was added one of contempt.  For, as he read the tableau at the table below him, the young man was the devotee of the young girl at his side, and if one could judge from her averted eyes, from her silent assent to his questions, from the fact that she withdrew from the talk between him and the older woman, his devotion was not welcome.

This reading of the pantomime pleased Edouard greatly.  Nothing could have so crowned the feeling which the beauty of the stranger stirred in him as the thought that another loved her as well as himself, and that the other, who started with all things in his favor, met with none from her.

Edouard assured himself that this was so because he had often heard his people boast that men not of their country could not feel as they could feel.  If he had ever considered them at all it was as cold and conscious creatures who taught themselves to cover up what they felt, so that when their emotions strove to assert themselves they were found, through long disuse, to be dumb and inarticulate.  Edouard rejoiced that to the men of his race it was given to feel and suffer much.  He was sure that beneath the calmness of her beauty this woman before him could feel deeply; he read in her eyes the sympathy of a great soul; she made him think of a Madonna in the church of St. Sophia at Budapest.  He saw in her a woman who could love greatly.  When he considered how impossible it was for the young man at her side ever to experience the great emotions which alone could reach her, his contempt for him rose almost to pity.  His violin, with his power to feel, and with his knowledge of technic added, could send his message as far as