He struck his hand down upon the keys as he spoke. That was the strangest prelude ever heard. In their different ways Doctor Levillier and Julian were both intensely fond of music, both quickly stirred by it when it was good, not merely classical, but extravagant, violent, and in any way interesting. Each of them had heard Valentine play, not once only, but a hundred times. They knew not simply his large _répertoire_ of pieces and songs through and through, but also the peculiar and characteristic progressions of his improvisations, the ornaments he most delighted in, the wildness of his melancholy, the phantasy of his gaieties; and they knew every tone of his voice, which expressed with an exquisite realism the temperament of his soul. But now, as Valentine's hands powerfully struck the keys, they both started and exchanged an involuntary glance of keen surprise. The first few bars gave the lie to Valentine's assertion that he could no longer play. A cataract of notes streamed from beneath his fingers, and of notes so curiously combined, or following each other in such a fantastic array, that they seemed arranged in the musical pattern by an intelligence of the strangest order. It is often easy for a cultivated ear to detect whether a given composition has sprung from the brain of a Frenchman, a German, a Hungarian, a Russian. The wildness of Bohemia, too, may be identified, or the vague sorrow of that northern melody which seems an echo of voices heard amid the fiords or in pale valleys near the farthest cape of Europe. And then there is that large and lofty music of the stars and the spheres, of the mightiest passions and of the deepest imaginings, that is of no definite country, but seems to be of its own power and beauty, and not of the brain and heart of any one man. It exists for eternity, and its creator can only wonder and worship before it, far from conceit as God was when He said, "Let there be light." Such music, too, is recognized on the instant by the men who have loved and studied the secrets of the most divine of the arts, for profound genius can utter itself as easily in five notes as in fifty. But the prelude now played by Valentine was neither the great music that is of all time and of all countries, nor the music that is of any one country. It was not even distinctively northern or southern in character, impregnated with the mystery of the tuneless, wonderful East, or with the peculiar homeliness that stirs Western hearts. Both the doctor and Julian felt, as they listened, that it was music without an earthly home, without location, devoid of that sense of relation to humanity which links the greatness of the arts to the smallness of those who follow them. Eccentric the music was, but the eccentricity of it seemed almost inhuman, so unmannerly as to be beyond the range of the most uncouth man, in advance of the invention of any mind, however coarse and criminal.