She knew how undeserved his praise was. Yet how delicious, oh, how delicious.

They were now walking so closely pressed against each other that their cheeks almost touched. She closed her eyes and ardently drank in the warm breath of his life. She felt she was being wafted to unknown blessed distances.

She did not come to herself until they reached her home.

"When?" he asked her.

She had no time the next day. She was invited out. But the day after.

Yes, the day after, she had the whole evening free. He need only call for her.

For fear she might after all ask him to come the very next day, she hurried into the house, ran up the steps, and concealed her happiness in the hushed apartment.

She did not turn on the lights. The street lamps, shining on the walls of the drawing-room and touching rainbow colours on the chandelier prisms, provided sufficient illumination.

She began to wander through the open doors from room to room, into the corner where the bed stood, around the dining table, across the drawing-room, into the cold guest room, which had never received a guest, up and down, back and forth, singing, crying, exulting.

And from amid her tears and singing and exultation suddenly arose--how did it go?

Come, my beloved! Let us go forth into the field, Let us spend the night in the villages.

Let us get up early to the vineyards, Let us see if the vine have blossomed.

No, not quite--a little different. But she would surely get it.

Impetuously she raised the lid of the piano, which had long remained closed. As if the neglected instrument, unforced into silence, had suddenly acquired a life of its own, a flood of sound rushed toward her, of which she had deemed neither the piano nor herself capable.

Let us see if the young grape have opened, Whether the pomegranates have budded, There will I give my young love unto thee.

Yes, that was the way it went. Exactly. She had found each note again.

Where had it kept itself hidden all those long years?

It seemed as if the last time she had sung it had been the very day before.

Yet worlds of suffering lay between.

No, not suffering.

"If only it had been suffering," thought Lilly, "the Song of Songs would never have become mute."

CHAPTER XIII

The next morning on awaking Lilly began to worry anew.

n.o.body was so blind as not to detect, on coming closer how worm-eaten was her existence. Least of all he whose fine feelings vibrated under each spiritual touch and awoke an anxious echo in her soul.

Even if it were possible for her to create a sort of island on which she might prevent him from coming into contact with her world, wasn't her very appearance a traitor? All those mad nights could not have pa.s.sed over her without leaving traces. Two years before Dr. Salmoni had already remarked a change in her appearance. "A cold, disdainful look,"

he had said.

She jumped from bed, and ran to the mirror to subject every feature to suspicious scrutiny.

Her eyes had grown tired. There was no disputing that. But they did not look disdainful. "Virgin Mary eyes," Dr. Rennschmidt had said, not "Madonna eyes." Was there a difference? On her brow were faint cobwebby lines; but she could well-nigh rub them away with her finger. "They will disappear with a little ma.s.saging," she said to herself. But the deep grooves on either side of her mouth were bad. They gave her face a haughty, satiated expression. "The paths that consuming pa.s.sion long has trod," she quoted from "Tannhauser in Rom," which she knew almost by heart.

And yet--had she not preserved her n.o.blest, her profoundest feelings? As if to save them up for this One, and now that the One had come, it was too late perhaps.

She spent the day in misery, and when Richard came for his tea, he found red eyes.

That afternoon proved to her clearly what she possessed in Richard. He asked so few questions, and was so sympathetic and full of solicitude, that for a moment or two she felt comforted and secure. She almost succ.u.mbed to the temptation to tell him a little about her new acquaintance, as was right between two such good friends. Fortunately she resisted the impulse. Rather let Adele into the secret, who had several times observed encouragingly:

"You may trust me fully. I know life far too well not to take the lady's side."

Wishing to avoid "the whole crew," as she dubbed the circle of her friends, Lilly pled sickness, and Richard rested satisfied. In the evening it occurred to her she had told Dr. Rennschmidt she was going out. She hastily put out the light, and sat brooding in the dark until bedtime.

The next morning the mail brought her a letter addressed in an unknown hand.

She tore the envelope open and read:

I cannot rest, I cannot sleep before I speak to you, before the prayer torn From out my breast in pa.s.sionate outpour Swiftly on wind and wave to you is borne.

I sit and dream by lighted lamp; still lies My work. With hours stolen I entwine A crown of flame that heavenly aspires In tongues of fire up round your head divine.

Oh, chide me not for uttering words uncalled; Chastise me not for sacred spell I've broken In which your lofty spirit is enthralled.

I am a struggler--I must needs have spoken.

Good Heavens! Did this refer to her, to Lilly Czepanek, who ate her heart out in dull self-depreciation?

If any human being in the world could think of her so, above all _he_, the most glorious--she knew the poem, though unsigned, came from him--then after all she was not in such a bad way; then perhaps her life had not taken a permanent hold upon her; probably her innermost being had remained intact, and values lay strewn in her soul which needed only to be used in order to sanctify and bless herself and others.

Long after she knew the verses by heart she read them again and again.

She could not tear her eyes from the beloved writing.

Then she tried to set the words to music. She opened the piano, and fantasied. Her playing came back to her as on the other night; everything she had known as a girl and had thought long forgotten came back. She needed merely to drop her fingers on the keys, and there it was--or nearly so.

But her finger joints were stiff, and the muscles of her lower arm soon wearied. She would have to practise and limber them.

"When he visits me, I can even play a cla.s.sic for him," she thought.

Buoyed by the new hope she floated further along on the current of her newly won self-esteem.

At the same time she kept careful count of each minute that separated her from the evening.

Richard found her practicing a.s.siduously.

"What's gotten into you to-day?" he asked. "I hadn't the slightest idea you could play so well."

"Neither had I," laughed Lilly.