The organist was interpreting Mozart to some hundreds of receptive citizens, making the great organ sing like a choir of angels in the "Gloria" of the Twelfth Mass, "_et in terra pax, pax, pax hominibus; bonae, bonae voluntatis_." All the spacious place was flooded with the impassioned harmonies of that inspired theme. Rachel was not what is popularly called musical, but in the dulness of her empty life her soul slacked its thirst in this way, as a soul of a lower order, which had been denied its natural nourishment, might have found comfort in the emotional stimulus of champagne or brandy. She could not play well herself, but she was like a fine instrument to be played upon; not one sweet phrase of melody passed from her listening ear to her sensitive heart without wakening an echo that had the very divine afflatus in it in response. And in this resonance of enthusiasms and aspirations, dumb and suffocated in the bondage of her artificial life--in the sense of breathing spiritual air, and freedom, though with a passion of enjoyment that filled her with far more pain than peace--she found the one true luxury of her much-envied lot. Long ago--oh, so long ago!--the music of a violin had led her into enchantment, as the Pied Piper of Hamelin led away the children. To-day the music of the Town Hall organ, speaking now in Mozart's dramatic choruses, and again in Baptiste's Andante in G, was a similar but a sadder incantation. She sat solitary in her far-away chair, with her feet on the rung of the one in front of her, her hands, gloved to perfection, folded in her lap, her delicate, neat dress daintily adjusted, much as she might have sat in the pew at church, a model of matronly grace and propriety. But who could tell, from the expression of her quiet _pose_ and her dreamy eyes, what ineffable raptures and fancies, what infinite longings and yearnings--nameless, even to her own consciousness, but all reminiscent of the blessed past--soared out of captivity on the wings of those alluring harmonies! Who could see that in her heart she was crying--crying bitterly--for the poetry and the beauty that were lost out of her life! There was an interval of silence, during which she sat quite still, looking at the great organ-pipes, and seeing nothing; and then there grew out of the hush the delicious rhythm of the "Faust" waltz, beating like a soft pulse through the summer air. What spell is there in the "Faust" waltz, or in any waltz, for one whose heart is capable of receiving and responding to the inspired message of Mozart? How can we tell? But this we know, that those whose hearts are warm and young--who understand how to love and how to dance, and have done the two things at the self-same moment--have seldom any more power than they have honest inclination to resist the subtle wiles of this simple measure.