He looked from the Madonna to Celia.  Beyond the carelessly drooping braids and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see the outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall.  The sight convicted him in the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded rustic.  In the presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely accumulating their spell upon him.

“It is all singing!” the player called out to him over her shoulder, in a minute of rest.  “That is what Chopin does—­he sings!”

She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind itself into sequence.  Then it came closer to him than the others had done.  The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed and inspired him.  He saw Celia’s shoulders sway under the impulse of the rubato license—­the privilege to invest each measure with the stress of the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will—­and the music she made spoke to him as with a human voice.  There was the wooing sense of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous eyes, and then—­

“You know this part, of course,” he heard her say.

On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden, where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral.  A sombre and lofty anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to his feet.  He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all that one should kneel to hear such music.

“This you’ll know too—­the funeral march from the Second Sonata,” she was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come.  He sank upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight around his knees.  His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird, mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in the bondage of an orderly sadness.  There was a propelling motion in the thing—­a sense of being borne bodily along—­which affected him like dizziness.  He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern, vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced for the sweet, comforting strain of solitary melody.  The clanging minor harmonies into which the march relapses came to their abrupt end.  Theron rose once more, and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.