And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series of variations on the lovely theme of the “Heynal”—­that traditional horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of Panna Marya—­of which Otto had spoken to Falloden.

But all these things were as yet hidden from Otto.  Falloden and Constance corresponded about them, in letters that anybody might have read, which had behind them, nevertheless, a secret and growing force of emotion.  Even Mrs. Mulholland, who was rapidly endearing herself both to Constance and Radowitz, could only guess at what was going on, and when she did guess, held her tongue.  But her relations with Falloden, which at the beginning of his residence in the cottage had been of the coldest, gradually became less strained.  To his own astonishment, he found the advice of this brusque elderly woman so important to him that he looked eagerly for her coming, and obeyed her with a docility which amazed himself and her.  The advice concerned, of course, merely the small matters of daily life bearing on Otto’s health and comfort, and when the business was done, Falloden disappeared.

But strangely amenable, and even humble as he might appear in these affairs to those who remembered his haughty days in college, for both Constance and Mrs. Mulholland quite another fact emerged from their experience of the cottage household during these weeks:—­simply this—­that whatever other people might do or be, Falloden was steadily, and perhaps unconsciously, becoming master of the situation, the indispensable and protecting power of Otto’s life.

How he did it remained obscure.  But Mrs. Mulholland at least—­out of a rich moral history—­guessed that what they saw in the Boar’s Hill cottage was simply the working out of the old spiritual paradox—­that there is a yielding which is victory, and a surrender which is power.  It seemed to her often that Radowitz was living in a constant state of half-subdued excitement, produced by the strange realisation that he and his life had become so important to Falloden that the differences of training and temperament between them, and all the little daily rubs, no longer counted; that he existed, so to speak, that Falloden might—­through him—­escape the burden of his own remorse.  The hard, strong, able man, so much older than himself in character, if not in years, the man who had bullied and despised him, was now becoming his servant, in the sense in which Christ was the “servant” of his brethren.  Not with any conscious Christian intention—­far from it; but still under a kind of mysterious compulsion.  The humblest duties, the most trivial anxieties, where Radowitz was concerned, fell, week by week, increasingly to Falloden’s portion.  A bad or a good night—­appetite or no appetite—­a book that Otto liked—­a visit that amused him—­anything that for the moment contented the starved musical sense in Otto,