Music! He appeared the antithesis of every grace, of every emotion associated with its production--an impossible grotesque, like a clown got up as a fiddle and proposing to play upon himself. There he stood in the glare of the footlights, as ungainly an anomaly as the mind could conceive. He was tall, he was supernaturally gaunt and angular; his long kit-shaped face, pallid as Death’s own, seemed pierced with two blackened sockets for eyes; his hair, lank and raven, straggled upon his shoulders. He was dressed in a tight-buttoned black swallow-tail and black trousers, loose for the period and awkwardly short at the ankles. As the storm of greeting subsided and the orchestra crashed out its symphony, he settled himself upon his right hip, like a badly articulated skeleton, and, raising bow and fiddle, dived his long chin into the latter, and, with a grinning snarl upon his face, poised the former, like a veritable fiend of extravaganza. Baronte knew it all so well, and waited impassive for the sequel, his eyes canvassing the breathless house rather than the performer. And then suddenly the bow descended, with a blow like a melodious sledge-hammer, and the wild, lovely orgy had begun. Paganini surely had never played before as he played that night. It was all stupendous, unsurpassable, horrible. The very violin seemed to bend and spring beneath his hands like the body of a young witch, alluring, eluding, brutifying. At the finish it was with a feeling of utter emotional collapse that Baronte crept from the house and sought his lodgings. This thing must end, he told himself--somehow this thing must end, and to-morrow. In the late morning he rose--to ominous skies and a sensation of stifling heat. A haggard ghost of himself, he sought the Master’s hotel. He knew the obscene creature’s customs--to fast at times, to gorge at times, to lie brooding all day, hating company as he hated priests and doctors; sometimes to break abroad in a wild convulsion of energy, and go tearing none knew whither. And to-day Fortune, whether for good or evil, favoured Baronte. As he approached the hotel, with the intent to take counsel of his friend Varano, he saw the demoniac figure itself issue from the portal, and hurry with distracted visage northwards. He hesitated a moment--then started in pursuit.