He paused for a moment; and Helen took a deep breath, thinking that it was the strangest conversation she had ever been called upon to listen to during an evening’s merriment.  Yet she did not smile, for the man’s deep, resonant voice fascinated her.

“And the second?” she asked.

“The second,” said Mr. Howard, turning his dark, sunken eyes full upon the girl, “is another man, not a genius, but one who has suffered, I fear, nearly as much as one; a man who is very hungry for beauty, and very impatient of insincerity, and who is accustomed to look to the great masters of art for all his help and courage.”

Helen felt very uncomfortable indeed.

“Evidently,” she said, “I am the third.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Howard, “the pianist is the third.  It is the pianist’s place to take the great work and live it, and study it until he knows all that it means; and then—­”

“I don’t think I took it quite so seriously as that,” said Helen, with a poor attempt at humility.

“No,” said Mr. Howard, gravely; “it was made evident to me that you did not by every note you played; for you treated it as if it had been a Liszt show-piece.”

Helen was of course exceedingly angry at those last blunt words; but she was too proud to let her vexation be observed.  She felt that she had gotten herself into the difficulty by asking for serious criticism, for deep in her heart she knew that it was true, and that she would never have dared to play the sonata had she known that a musician was present.  Helen felt completely humiliated, her few minutes’ conversation having been enough to put her out of humor with herself and all of her surroundings.  There was a long silence, in which she had time to think of what she had heard; she felt in spite of herself the folly of what she had done, and her whole triumph had suddenly come to look very small indeed; yet, as was natural, she felt only anger against the man who had broken the spell and destroyed her illusion.  She was only the more irritated because she could not find any ground upon which to blame him.

It would have been very difficult for her to have carried on the conversation after that.  Fortunately a diversion occurred, the young person who had last played having gone to the piano again, this time with a young man and a violin.

“Aunt Polly has found someone to take your place,” said Helen, forcing a smile.

“Yes,” said the other, “she told me we had another violinist.”

The violinist played Raff’s Cavatina, a thing with which fiddlers all love to exhibit themselves; he played it just a little off the key at times, as Helen might have told by watching her companion’s eyebrows.  She in the meantime was trying to recover her equanimity, and to think what else she could say.  “He’s the most uncomfortable man I ever met,” she thought with vexation.  “I wish I’d insisted upon keeping away from him!”