When Diaz returned and seated himself to play the Berceuse, I saw that he could look at me without turning his head.  And now, instead of flushing, I went cold.  My spine gave way suddenly.  I began to be afraid; but of what I was afraid I had not the least idea.  I fixed my eyes on my programme as he launched into the Berceuse.  Twice I glanced up, without, however, moving my head, and each time his burning blue eyes met mine.  (But why did I choose moments when the playing of the piece demanded less than all his attention?) The Berceuse was a favourite.  In sentiment it was simpler than the great pieces that had preceded it.  Its excessive delicacy attracted; the finesse of its embroidery swayed and enraptured the audience; and the applause at the close was mad, deafening, and peremptory.  But Diaz was notorious as a refuser of encores.  It had been said that he would see a hall wrecked by an angry mob before he would enlarge his programme.  Four times he came forward and acknowledged the tribute, and four times he went back.  At the fifth response he halted directly in front of me, and in his bold, grave eyes I saw a question.  I saw it, and I would not answer.  If he had spoken aloud to me I could not have more clearly understood.  But I would not answer.  And then some power within myself, hitherto unsuspected by me, some natural force, took possession of me, and I nodded my head....  Diaz went to the piano.

He hesitated, brushing lightly the keys.

‘The Prelude in F sharp,’ my thought ran.  ‘If he would play that!’

And instantly he broke into that sweet air, with its fateful hushed accompaniment—­the trifle which Chopin threw off in a moment of his highest inspiration.

‘It is the thirteenth Prelude,’ I reflected.  I was disturbed, profoundly troubled.

The next piece was the last, and it was the Fantasia, the masterpiece of Chopin.

In the Fantasia there speaks the voice of a spirit which has attained all that humanity may attain:  of wisdom, of power, of pride and glory.  And now it is like the roll of an army marching slowly through terrific defiles; and now it is like the quiet song of royal wanderers meditating in vast garden landscapes, with mossy masonry and long pools and cypresses, and a sapphire star shining in the purple sky on the shoulder of a cypress; and now it is like the cry of a lost traveller, who, plunging heavily through a virgin forest, comes suddenly upon a green circular sward, smooth as a carpet, with an antique statue of a beautiful nude girl in the midst; and now it is like the oratory of richly-gowned philosophers awaiting death in gorgeous and gloomy palaces; and now it is like the upward rush of winged things that are determined to achieve, knowing well the while that the ecstasy of longing is better than the assuaging of desire.  And though the voice of this spirit speaking in the music disguises itself so variously, it is always the same.  For it cannot, and it