It was with these variations, now on the point of completion that Michael meant to spend his solitary and rapturous evening.  The spirits of the air—­whatever those melodious sprites may be—­had for the last month made themselves very audible to him, and the half-dozen further variations that Hermann had demanded had rung all day in his head.  Now, as they neared completion, he found that they ceased their singing; their work of dictation was done; he had to this extent expressed himself, and they haunted him no longer.  At present he had but jotted down the skeleton of bars that could be filled in afterwards, and it gave him enormous pleasure to see the roles reversed and himself out of his own brain, setting Falbe his task.

But he felt much more than this.  He had done something.  Michael, the dumb, awkward Michael, was somehow revealed on those eight pages of music.  All his twenty-five years he had stood wistfully inarticulate, unable, so it had seemed to him, to show himself, to let himself out.  And not till now, when he had found this means of access, did he know how passionately he had desired it, nor how immensely, in the process of so doing, his desire had grown.  He must find out more ways, other channels of projecting himself.  The need for that, as of a diver throwing himself into the empty air and the laughing waters below him, suddenly took hold of him.

He took a clean sheet of music paper, into which he placed his pages, and with a pleasurable sense of pomp wrote in the centre of it: 

Variations on an air.

By

Michael Comber.

He paused a moment, then took up his pen again.

“Dedicated to Sylvia Falbe,” he wrote at the top.

CHAPTER VII

Michael had been so engrossingly employed since his return to London in the autumn that the existence of other ties and other people apart from those immediately connected with his work had worn a very shadow-like aspect.  He had, it is true, written with some regularity to his mother, finding, somewhat to his dismay, how very slight the common ground between them was for purposes of correspondence.  He could outline the facts that he had been to several concerts, that he had seen much of his music-master, that he had been diligent at his work, but he realised that there was nothing in detail about those things that could possibly interest her, and that nothing except them really interested him.  She on her side had little to say except to record the welfare of Petsy, to remark on the beauty of October, and tell him how many shooting parties they had had.