The legless man looked straight ahead of him into the dim room.  Then, smiling, his head a little on one side, he caressed his piano so that it gave out Chopin’s 7th Prelude, which, as all the world knows, is a little girl who smiles because she is happy; and she is happy because so many of the flowers in the garden are blue.  It is not known why this makes her happy, only that it does.

And forthwith he played Chopin and only Chopin:  brooks and pools of sound to which you did not listen, but in which you bathed.  And in his soul the legless man was playing only for Barbara, and only to Barbara.  And so powerful was this obsession that it stole out of him like some hypnotic influence, affected the others, and gave him away.  First Blythe looked toward Barbara, not realizing why, then Haddon looked, then Mrs. Bruce.

Barbara felt the warm blood in her cheeks.  She was troubled, unhappy, touched.  A man, his face full of unhappy yearning, his soul quick with genius, was making love to her; asking her to forget his shortcomings, to forgive his sins, to give him a hand upward out of the dark places into the light.  He followed her, always pleading, by brooks, into valleys, through flowery meadows in the early morning, into solemn churches, into groves of cypress flooded with moonlight.

[Illustration:  And in his soul the legless man was playing only for Barbara]

Blythe could have sworn that a woman sobbed, but his eyes, used by now to the obscurity, told him that it was neither Mrs. Bruce nor Barbara.  The piano burst into a storm of sound, under cover of which Rose, still at her post, torn with jealousy, continued to pedal at the direction of her lord and master, and sobbed as if her heart would break.  Devils filled the room, whirling in mad dances; they screamed and yelled; the souls of the damned screeched in torment; and the face of him who invoked the inferno, swollen, streaming with sweat, the eyes glazed, protruding, was the face of a madman.

Rose, for whom her master’s playing had the eloquence and precision of speech, forgot her jealousy in fear of those consequences which her ill-timed sobbing must bring upon her.  Her tears dried as in a desert wind; her sobs ceased, and in a moment or two the madness was going out of Blizzard’s music and out of his face.  He rested, preluded, and then began to play Beethoven, quietly, with a pure singing tone, music of a heavenly sanity.

The jarred feelings of his audience were soothed.  Into his own face there stole a high-priest look.  And when he had finished playing, this look remained for a few moments.  Then he laughed quietly and, speaking for the first time, expressed the hope that he had not made them listen too long.

He reached for the wall behind him, and turned a switch so that the room became brightly lighted.  Then, reluctantly, he came out from behind the piano, swinging between his crutches, and leaving Rose to escape at the first favorable opportunity.  His descent from colossus to cripple had an unpleasant effect.  And the question, “How the deuce do you work the pedals?” was jerked from Blythe, usually a most tactful person.