A cold May day, so chilly that a fire seemed the most welcome thing on earth. Seven in the evening, and it was the last lesson of the quarter. When she reached “Claremont,” Verreker was not there. He had been up to the City, and a slight accident outside Liverpool Street Station had delayed the trains. The maid showed her into the music-room and left her alone. She sat in one of the big chairs by the fire and felt astonishingly miserable. The room had regained its normal condition; the surplus furniture, the books, papers, writing-desk, etc., had been taken away: but a grandfather clock that had not originally been there now occupied a permanent position in the corner. The embers were burning low, and shadows were darkening all around: the black and white vista of piano keys straggled obscurely in the background; the clock was ticking sleepily away. Far into the dim distance of the ceiling loomed the polished splendour of the raised sound-board.... Why did she feel miserable? It was something in her soul. She got up and sat down at the piano. With no discoverable motive she commenced to play the piece that she now knew was Chopin’s Black Note Etude (in G flat). It was the one she had heard years ago when she stood in the scented dusk of the Ridgeway in front of the house with the corner bay-window. Since then she had learned it thoroughly and played it many times on concert platforms. But as she played it now it sounded new, or rather, it sounded as if she had heard it only once before, and that was many years ago in the summer twilight. All between was a gap, a void which only the Chopin Etude could bridge.... (In her strange mood she was playing it most abominably, by the way.) She paused in the middle. Her eyes were like dark gems amidst the red glory of her hair. “I’m not in love with _any person_,” she told herself with incredible calmness. “I’m not in love with anybody in the world. But I’m in love with _Something_. Some Thing! Very deeply, very passionately, I am. And I don’t know what it is.... I keep finding it and losing it again. But it’s in this”--she started the first few bars of the Chopin piece--“it’s all everywhere in that. I knew it was there when I stood and listened to it years ago. Oh, it’s there. And I’ve heard and seen it in other places, too. But as yet it’s been only a _thing_.... But some day, maybe, I’ll tack it on to somebody living, and then ... God help me! ...” Her fingers flew over the keys, and the great octaves began to sing out in the left hand.