“And you will tell me what you feel?”

“Yes.”

Aaron went out to his overcoat.  When he returned with his flute, which he was screwing together, Manfredi had come with the tray and the three cocktails.  The Marchesa took her glass.

“Listen, Manfredi,” she said.  “Mr. Sisson is going to play, quite alone in the sala.  And I am going to sit here and listen.”

“Very well,” said Manfredi.  “Drink your cocktail first.  Are you going to play without music?”

“Yes,” said Aaron.

“I’ll just put on the lights for you.”

“No—­leave it dark.  Enough light will come in from here.”

“Sure?” said Manfredi.

“Yes.”

The little soldier was an intruder at the moment.  Both the others felt it so.  But they bore him no grudge.  They knew it was they who were exceptional, not he.  Aaron swallowed his drink, and looked towards the door.

“Sit down, Manfredi.  Sit still,” said the Marchesa.

“Won’t you let me try some accompaniment?” said the soldier.

“No.  I shall just play a little thing from memory,” said Aaron.

“Sit down, dear.  Sit down,” said the Marchesa to her husband.

He seated himself obediently.  The flash of bright yellow on the grey of his uniform seemed to make him like a chaffinch or a gnome.

Aaron retired to the other room, and waited awhile, to get back the spell which connected him with the woman, and gave the two of them this strange isolation, beyond the bounds of life, as it seemed.

He caught it again.  And there, in the darkness of the big room, he put his flute to his lips, and began to play.  It was a clear, sharp, lilted run-and-fall of notes, not a tune in any sense of the word, and yet a melody, a bright, quick sound of pure animation, a bright, quick, animate noise, running and pausing.  It was like a bird’s singing, in that it had no human emotion or passion or intention or meaning—­a ripple and poise of animate sound.  But it was unlike a bird’s singing, in that the notes followed clear and single one after the other, in their subtle gallop.  A nightingale is rather like that —­a wild sound.  To read all the human pathos into nightingales’ singing is nonsense.  A wild, savage, non-human lurch and squander of sound, beautiful, but entirely unaesthetic.

What Aaron was playing was not of his own invention.  It was a bit of mediaeval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol.  It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know it, a hateful wire-drawn nerve-torturer.

After a little while, when he entered the smaller room again, the Marchesa looked full into his face.

“Good!” she said.  “Good!”