The door in the anteroom opened, her guest entered.  Alixe was not dismayed.  She left her seat and, closing the curtains, greeted him.

The overture was ending as Rentgen sat down beside her in the intimate little chamber, lighted by a solitary electric bulb.

“You are always thoughtful,” she murmured.

“My dear lady, mine is the honour.  And if you do not care, can’t we hear the music of your young man—­” he smiled, she thought, acidly—­“here?  If I sit outside, the world will say—­we have to be careful of our unsmirched reputations—­we poor critics and slave-drivers of the deaf.”

She drew her hand gently away.  He had held it, playfully tapping it as he slowly delivered himself in short sentences.  He was a Dane, but his French and English were without trace of accent; certain intonations alone betrayed his Scandinavian origin.

Alixe could not refuse, for the moment he finished speaking she heard a too familiar motive, the ponderous phrase in the brass choir which Van Kuyp intended as the thematic label for his hero, “Sordello.”

“Ah, there’s your Browning in tone for you,” whispered the critic.  She wished him miles away.  The draperies were now slightly parted and into the room filtered the grave, languorous accents of the new tone-poem.  Her eyes were fixed by Rentgen’s.  His expression changed; with nostrils dilated like a hunter scenting prey, his rather inert, cold features became transfigured; he was the man who listened, the cruel judge who sentenced.  And she hoped, also the kind friend who would consider the youth and inexperience of the culprit.  To the morbidly acute hearing of the woman, the music had a ring of hollow sonority after the denser packed phrases of Weber.

She had read Sordello with her husband until she thought its meaning was as clear as high noon.  By the critic’s advice the subject had been selected for musical treatment.  Sordello’s overweening spiritual pride—­“gate-vein of this heart’s blood of Lombardy”—­appealed to Van Kuyp.  The stress of souls, the welter of cross-purposes which begirt the youthful dreamer, his love for Palma, and his swift death when all the world thrust upon him its joys—­here were motives, indeed, for any musician of lofty aim and sympathetic imagination.

Alixe recalled the interminable arguments, the snatches of poetry, the hasty rushes to the keyboard; a composer was in travail.  At the end of a year, Rentgen professed his satisfaction; Van Kuyp stood on the highroad to fame.  Of that there could be no doubt; Elvard Rentgen would say so in print.  Alixe had been reassured—­

Yet sitting now within the loop of her husband’s music it suddenly became insipid, futile, and lacking in those enchantments for which she yearned.  Her eyes dropped to the shapely hands meekly folded in her lap, dropped because the bold, interrogative expression on Rentgen’s face disturbed her.  She knew, as any woman would have known, that he admired her—­but was he not Richard’s friend?  His glance enveloped her with piteous mockery.