“Yes.  I’ve always been more or less music-mad.  But machinery will never approach the hand.”

“I know a man....  But I’ll tell you about him some other time.  I’m crazy over music, too.  I can’t pump out all there is to these compositions.  Try something.”

Spurlock gratefully accepted the Grieg concerto, gratefully, because it was brilliant and thunderous. Papillon would have broken him down; anything tender would have sapped his will; and like as not he would have left the stool and rushed into the night.  He played for an hour—­Grieg, Chopin, Rubenstein, Liszt, crashing music.  The action steadied him; and there was a phase of irony, too, that helped.  He had been for months without music of the character he loved—­and he dared not play any of it!

McClintock, after the music began, left the piano and sat in a corner just beyond the circle of light cast by the lamp.  His interest was divided:  while his ears drank in the sounds, his glance constantly roved from Ruth to the performer and back to Ruth.  These amazing infants!

Suddenly he came upon the true solution:  that the boy hadn’t meant to steal whatever it was he had stolen.  A victim of one of those mental typhoons that scatter irretrievably the barriers of instinct and breeding; and he had gone on the rocks all in a moment.  Never any doubt of it.  That handsome, finely drawn face belonged to a soul with clean ideals.  All in a moment.  McClintock’s heart went out to Spurlock; he would always be the boy’s friend, even though he had dragged this girl on to the rocks with him.

Love and lavender, he thought, perhaps wistfully.  He could remember when women laid away their gowns in lavender—­as this girl’s mother had.  He would always be her friend, too.  That boy—­blind as a bat!  Why, he hadn’t seen the Woman until to-night!

From the first chord of the Grieg concerto to the finale of the Chopin ballade, Ruth had sat tensely on the edge of her chair.  She had dreaded the beginning of this hour.  What would happen to her?  Would her soul be shaken, twisted, hypnotized?—­as it had been those other times?  Music—­that took out of her the sense of reality, whirled her into the clouds, that gave to her will the directless energy of a chip of wood on stormy waters.  But before the Grieg concerto was done, she knew that she was free.  Free!  All the fine ecstasy, without the numbing terror.

Spurlock sat limply, his arms hanging.  McClintock, striking a match to relight his cigar, broke the spell.  Ruth sighed; Spurlock stood up and drew his hand across his forehead as if awakening from a dream.

“I didn’t know the machine had such stuff in it,” said McClintock.  “I imagine I must have a hundred rolls—­all the old fellows.  It’s a sorry world,” he went on.  “Nobody composes any more, nobody paints, nobody writes—­I mean, on a par with what we’ve just heard.”