Then after stumbling wretchedly through two lines of it, he suddenly forgot himself and Falbe, and the squealing unresponsive notes.  He heard them no more, absorbed in the knowledge of what he meant by them, of the mood which they produced in him.  His great, ungainly hands had all the gentleness and self-control that strength gives, and the finger-filling chords were as light and as fine as the settling of some poised bird on a bough.  In the last few lines of the prelude a deep bass note had to be struck at the beginning of each bar; this Michael found was completely dumb, but so clear and vivid was the effect of it in his mind that he scarcely noticed that it returned no answer to his finger. . . .  At the end he sat without moving, his hands dropped on to his knees.

Falbe got up and, coming over to the piano, struck the bass note himself.

“Yes, I knew it was dumb,” he said, “but you made me think it wasn’t. . . .  You got quite a good tone out of it.”

He paused a moment, again striking the dumb note, as if to make sure that it was soundless.

“Yes; I’ll teach you,” he said.  “All the technique you have got, you know, is wrong from beginning to end, and you mustn’t mind unlearning all that.  But you’ve got the thing that matters.”

All this stewed and seethed in Michael’s mind as he sat that night by the window looking out on to the silent and empty street.  His thoughts flowed without check or guide from his will, wandering wherever their course happened to take them, now lingering, like the water of a river in some deep, still pool, when he thought of the friendship that had come into his life, now excitedly plunging down the foam of swift-flowing rapids in the exhilaration of his newly-found liberty, now proceeding with steady current at the thought of the weeks of unremitting industry at a beloved task that lay in front of him.  He could form no definite image out of these which should represent his ordinary day; it was all lost in a bright haze through which its shape was but faintly discernible; but life lay in front of him with promise, a thing to be embraced and greeted with welcome and eager hands, instead of being a mere marsh through which he had to plod with labouring steps, a business to be gone about without joy and without conviction in its being worth while.

He wondered for a moment, as he rose to go to bed, what his feelings would have been if, at the end of his performance on the sore-throated and voiceless piano, Falbe had said:  “I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything with you.”  As he knew, Falbe intended for the future only to take a few pupils, and chiefly devote himself to his own practice with a view to emerging as a concert-giver the next winter; and as Michael had sat down, he remembered telling himself that there was really not the slightest chance of his friend accepting him as a pupil.  He did not intend that this rejection should make the smallest difference to his aim, but he knew that