Under heavy trees that split the moonlight into a thousand fragments she suddenly heard the rich hum of a grand piano. She stopped. She stood in the shadow of the hedge and listened in rapture. The house was a large one, with a corner bay-window wide open, and it was from that room evidently that the music was proceeding. It was some rapid piece full of rippling streams of notes with very few chords, octaves in the base clef that thundered like the oncoming tide, swirling waves of treble triplets that were light as air, yet beneath all the laughter and freedom, a sense of dim, unuttered passion, half hopeful, half melancholy. Long afterwards she knew it was Chopin’s Black Note Study in G flat. But then it had no name to her. It might have been the latest ragtime craze for all she knew: all she cared was that it expressed all the feelings in her own heart that she had thought inexpressible, things that she had often and in vain tried to wring out of the Collard and Collard at home. At that moment it is probable that she would have given everything she had in the world for that piano. It stood to her as the one way to salvation. She would have bartered her soul for it. As it was, she stood there in the spattered moonlight and cried for it. At any rate, she cried.... The piece finished up in a tremendous cascade of double octaves, and she waited nearly half an hour after that, hoping the playing might begin again. Then she walked back to Kitchener Road almost in a state of trance. The Bockley High Street was very white and deserted, and far into the dim distance stretched the tram-rails, blue and infinite. It was long past eleven. But Catherine was dreaming--dreaming of one thing only (though that one thing was strangely complicated by other things)--dreaming of a grand piano, dreaming of the ecstasy of playing it as she had heard it played that night. The vision of her ambition came to her as she turned into Kitchener Road. She would become a great pianoforte player. Already discerning critics--adjudicators at musical festivals and such like--had prophesied a career for her if she would work hard. Hitherto it had not seemed worth while to work hard. Now it became suddenly and tremendously worth all the soul and energy she could give to it. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else could ever matter. Whatever stuff her soul was made of, music was part of it, and music would answer everything her soul asked. At home her father was waiting up, vaguely remonstrative as usual. “Worse and worse it gets, Cathie ...” he began ... “the first night you’re home after your holiday you land in at twenty to twelve! ... it’s not good enough ... you’ve had all the morning and afternoon. I can’t think what makes you want to go walking the streets this time....” “I’m not having any supper,” she said brusquely. “Good-night....” “But----”