He arose suddenly; a fixed glow was upon his face, his eyes were one solemn glory. He came to the piano, he pushed me gently aside, he took his seat noiselessly, as he began to play. I would not retire. I stood where I could both see and hear. It was the second movement that first arrested him. He gave to the white-faced keys a hundred voices. Tone upon tone was built; the chords grew larger and larger; no other hand could have so elicited the force, the burden, the breadth of the orchestral medium, from those faint notes and few. His articulating finger supplied all needs of mechanism. He doubled and redoubled his power. Never shall I forget it,--the measures so long and lingering, the modulations so like his own, the very subject moulded from the chosen key, like sculpture of the most perfect chiselling from a block of the softest grain,--so appropriate, so masterly. But what pained me through the loveliness of the conception was to realize the mood suggesting it,--a plaint of spiritual suffering, a hungering and thirsting heart, a plea of exhausted sadness. He felt it too; for as the weary, yet unreproachful strain fell from under his music-burdened fingers, he drooped his glorious head as a lily in the drenching rain, his lips grew grave, the ecstatic smile was lost, and in his eyes there was a dim expression, though they melted not to tears. I was sure that Maria had conserved her dream, for a strange, intermittent accompaniment streamed through the loftier appeal, and was as a golden mist over too much piercing brightness. The movement was very long, and he never spoke all through it, neither when he had played as far as she had written; but turned back to the first, as yet untried. Again was I forcibly reminded of what I had said on my first acquaintance with her; she had, without servile intention, caught the very spirit of Seraphael as it wandered through his compositions, and imprisoned it in the sympathy of her own. It was as two flowers whose form is single and the same, but the hues were of different distribution, and still his own supreme. I cannot describe the first movement further. I was too young to be astonished, carried away by the miracle of its consummation under such peculiar circumstances; but I can remember how completely I felt I might always trust myself in future when any one should gain such ascendency over my convictions,--which, by the way, never happened. I must not dwell upon that evening,--suffice it to say that I left the score with the Chevalier; and though he did not tell me so in so many words, I felt sure he himself would restore it to the writer.