[Illustration:  Connie sat down beside Radowitz and they looked at each other in silence]

They found Radowitz lying partly dressed on the balcony of his back room, which overlooked a tiny walled patch of grass and two plane-trees.  The plane-tree seems to have been left in pity to London by some departing rural deity.  It alone nourishes amid the wilderness of brick; and one can imagine it as feeling a positive satisfaction, a quiet triumph, in the absence of its stronger rivals, oak and beech and ash, like some gentle human life escaped from the tyrannies of competition.  These two great trees were the guardian genii of poor Otto’s afternoons.  They brought him shade and coolness, even in the hottest hours of a burning June.

Connie sat down beside him, and they looked at each other in silence.  Sorell, after a few gay words, had left them together.  Radowitz held her hand in his own left.  The other was bandaged and supported on a pillow.  “When she got used to the golden light filtering through the plane leaves, she saw that he was pale and shrunken, that his eyes were more living and blue than ever, and his hair more like the burnished halo of some Florentine or Siennese saint.  Yet the whole aspect was of something stricken.  She felt a foreboding, a terror, of which she knew she must let nothing appear.

“Do you mind my staring?” he said presently, with his half-sad, half-mischievous smile.  “You are so nice to look at.”

She tried to laugh.

“I put on my best frock.  Do you like it?”

“For me?” he said, wondering.  “And you brought me these roses?”

He lifted some out of the basket, looked at them, then let them drop listlessly on his knee.  “I am afraid I don’t care for such things, as I used to do.  Before—­this happened, I had a language of my own, in which I could express everything—­as artists or poets can.  Now—­I am struck dumb.  There is something crying in me—­that can find no voice.  And when one can’t express, one begins not to feel!”

She had to check the recurring tears before she could reply.

“But you can still compose?”

Her tone, in repeating the same words she had used to Sorell, fell into the same pleading note.

He shook his head, almost with irritation.

“It was out of the instrument—­out of improvisation—­that all my composing grew.  Do you remember the tale they tell of George Sand, how when she began a novel, she made a few dots and scratches on a sheet of paper, and as she played with them they ran into words, and then into sentences—­that suggested ideas—­and so, in half an hour, she had sketched a plot, and was ready to go to work?  So it was with me.  As I played, the ideas came.  I am not one of your scientific musicians who can build up everything in vacuo.  I must translate everything into sound—­through my fingers.  It was the same with Chopin.”  He pointed to a life of Chopin that was lying open on the couch beside him.