“You must gom and blay to me at Schlachsenberg,” said the kindly-faced Landgraf, whom the world adored and thwarted in about equal proportions.  “At Christmas, yes, that will be a good time.  We still keep the Christ-Fest at Schlachsenberg, though the ‘Sozi’ keep telling our schoolchildren that it is only a Christ myth.  Never mind, I will have the Vice-President of our Landtag to listen to you; he is ‘Sozi’ but we are good friends outside the Parliament House; you shall blay to him, my young friendt, and gonfince him that there is a Got in Heaven.  You will gom?  Yes?”

“It was beautiful,” said the Grafin simply; “it made me cry.  Go back to the piano again, please, at once.”

Perhaps the near neighbourhood of the Canon inspired this command, but the Grafin had been genuinely charmed.  She adored good music and she was unaffectedly fond of good-looking boys.

Ronnie went back to the piano and tasted the matured pleasure of a repeated success.  Any measure of nervousness that he may have felt at first had completely passed away.  He was sure of his audience and he played as though they did not exist.  A renewed clamour of excited approval attended the conclusion of his performance.

“It is a triumph, a perfectly glorious triumph,” exclaimed the Duchess of Dreyshire, turning to Yeovil, who sat silent among his wife’s guests; “isn’t it just glorious?” she demanded, with a heavy insistent intonation of the word.

“Is it?” said Yeovil.

“Well, isn’t it?” she cried, with a rising inflection, “isn’t it just perfectly glorious?”

“I don’t know,” confessed Yeovil; “you see glory hasn’t come very much my way lately.”  Then, before he exactly realised what he was doing, he raised his voice and quoted loudly for the benefit of half the room: 

   “’Other Romans shall arise,
   Heedless of a soldier’s name,
   Sounds, not deeds, shall win the prize,
   Harmony the path to fame.’”

There was a sort of shiver of surprised silence at Yeovil’s end of the room.

“Hell!”

The word rang out in a strong young voice.

“Hell!  And it’s true, that’s the worst of it.  It’s damned true!”

Yeovil turned, with some dozen others, to see who was responsible for this vigorously expressed statement.

Tony Luton confronted him, an angry scowl on his face, a blaze in his heavy-lidded eyes.  The boy was without a conscience, almost without a soul, as priests and parsons reckon souls, but there was a slumbering devil-god within him, and Yeovil’s taunting words had broken the slumber.  Life had been for Tony a hard school, in which right and wrong, high endeavour and good resolve, were untaught subjects; but there was a sterling something in him, just that something that helped poor street-scavenged men to die brave-fronted deaths in the trenches of Salamanca, that fired a handful of apprentice boys to shut the gates of Derry and stare unflinchingly at grim leaguer and starvation.  It was just that nameless something that was lacking in the young musician, who stood at the further end of the room, bathed in a flood of compliment and congratulation, enjoying the honey-drops of his triumph.