Thin ribbons of bright paper volleyed rocket-wise from table to table and fell in festoons from overhead wires.  Dancers forced their way through showers of breaking strands, and swayed rhythmically on, trailing broken shreds of kaleidoscopic color.

Like punctuations of sound came the popping of balloons and corks.

Paul Burton’s hosts had arrived at the stage of mellow exhilaration, but over Paul himself, as his eyes met the great clock which was to herald the eventful moment, fell a sudden shadow of black depression.  Another year to face!  He thought of what he had promised to do with this one—­and of what he had done!  Those last moments in his music-room rose to his memory and they carried a penalty which slugged his heart into an intensity of shame and misery.  Paul Burton, sitting there with this thin semblance of merriment around him, saw himself once again very clearly for what he was.

Thayre leaned over.  “I say, men,” he suggested with the enthusiasm of a new and bright idea sparkling in his eyes, “let’s call the head waiter and have Burton play for us.  The management will be jolly well pleased when they know they’re getting the greatest instrumentalist in New York.”

Paul protested, but Thayre was a man of quick action, and a moment later the waiter had brought the head waiter, and the head waiter had gone for the manager.

Such patrons as these the manager had every wish to oblige, and he was by no means unwilling to utilise such an artist as Paul Burton when the lights came on again and his patrons rose to their feet for the national anthem.

“Of course,” cautioned Thayre, “Mr. Burton doesn’t want his name announced,” and even to that restriction, limiting the value of his extemporaneous “feature,” the manager reluctantly acceded.

To live for music and to have no instrument with which to express one’s emotions means a tortured privation of the spirit.  Paul Burton, as he took his seat at the piano, forgot that it was New Year’s eve on Broadway, forgot the lights, the confetti and the toy balloons.  He remembered only that here were keys which unlocked his dream-world of music, and when he began to play the clamor of the place slowly and quite unconsciously subsided, and quiet came—­not at once, but as a delirium may soften slowly into sleep under the stroke of a soothing hand.

When from an outlying table a woman, grown louder of laughter than she realized, interrupted this quiet, a score of faces turned angrily in her direction, rebuking her with their glances.

But the music went on and the great crowd which had a few moments before been abandoning itself to noise and riot now found itself listening—­listening in a sort of rapt trance—­with its many gazes converging on a slender young man.  His pallid face and cameo features seemed exalted and his eyes burned strangely under the dark locks that fell across his forehead.