During the month that followed, Bedient wrote at length to all his friends in New York.  Nightly he roamed the hills and rode his lands throughout the long forenoons.  It was a season of sheer exaltation.  The great house had become dear to him.  His own fullness was enough.  There was no loneliness—­“loneliness, with our planet in the Milky Way?"...  He felt a sense of authority in what he wrote, altogether new, a more finished simplicity—­the very white wine of clarity.

Then he placed great energies of planting upon the lands Jaffier had conferred upon Miss Mallory; and carried out plans for the increase of his own harvests.  In fact, he was more interested than ever in this base of his future operations in New York.  He realized the need of help—­an ordering executive mind.  His brain and body quickly adjusted to the great good which had descended upon him—­work and praise, and love for all things.  With these, his hours breathed.

One midnight in July, as he lay awake, an impulse came to play Beethoven’s symphony—­in the dark....  He arranged the four rolls to hand, turned off the lights again, and sat down before the orchestrelle.  The opening bars, which the Master designated, “So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte,” lured his every power of concentration.  He was one with it, and movements of the dark swung with the flow of harmony.  The silence startled him.  It was hard to re-assemble his faculties to change the rolls for the ’Andante....

The three voices returned to his mind—­man and woman and the luminous third Presence.  That which had always been dim and formless before, now cleared—­the place and the man.  The room was large and had the character of a music studio, or one department of a large conservatory.  A grand piano, a stand for violin, pictures of the masters, and famous musical scenes on the wall—­more, there was music in the air—­intervals when the three figures seemed to listen.  A violin was across the man’s knee, a bow in his right hand.

The man was down, whipped.  The world had been too much for him.  The face was not evil, nor was it mighty.  A tall young man—­a figure knit with beauty and precision.  It was the figure of a small man enlarged, rather than one of natural bulk.  Bedient’s recognition of the man was not material; some inner correspondence made him know....  He was sitting upon a rocker, too small and low for him.  The long, perfect limbs stretched out would have appeared lax and drunken but for their grace of line.  The bow-hand dropped limp, almost to the floor.  The other moved the violin about, handled it lightly, familiarly, as one would play with a scarf.  Fugitive humor flashed across the face, relieving the deep disquiet, but the laugh was an effort of one who was confronted by demolished fortunes.  His whole look was that of a man who has been shown some structural smallness of his own, shown beyond doubt—­his ranges of personal limitation, made clear and irrefutable.  He recognized his master in the woman opposite....  Yet powerful natural elements within him were bearing upon the hateful revelation.  They sought to cover the puny nakedness, and make an hallucination of it all.  He was not evolved enough to accept the truth with humility.