“I know perfectly well what you mean,” answered Everett, thoughtfully.  “And yet it’s difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes, so little mars.”

Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with feverish earnestness.  “Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate.”

“Come, come,” expostulated Everett, now alarmed at her excitement.  “Where is the new sonata?  Let him speak for himself.”

He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech.  The sonata was the most ambitious work he had done up to that time, and marked the transition from his early lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style.  Everett played intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular.  When he had finished he turned to Katharine.

“How he has grown!” she cried.  “What the three last years have done for him!  He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell.  This is my tragedy, as I lie here, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me—­ah, God! the swift feet of the runners!”

She turned her face away and covered it with her hands.  Everett crossed over to her and knelt beside her.  In all the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an occasional ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat.  Her courage had become a point of pride with him.

“Don’t do it,” he gasped.  “I can’t stand it, I really can’t, I feel it too much.”

When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed.  “No, I won’t; I will save that for the night, when I have no better company.  Run over that theme at the beginning again, will you?  It was running in his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at the dinner-table.  He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn came on, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter.  He lost touch with his idea, I suppose, during his illness.  Do you remember those frightful days?  All the people who have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself!  When I got word from Florence that he had been ill, I was singing at Monte Carlo.  His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I reached him first.  I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm.  They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the library—­a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture and bronzes.  He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room, looking, oh, so worn and pale!—­as he always does when he is ill, you know.  Ah, it is so good that you do know!  Even his