Meanwhile from the distance come bursts of wild music; and at last Helena returns--pale, and deeply agitated. “It is that _concerto!_” she says, and then asks to be excused from talking. Lloyd comes, and stands by the door watching her. When his teacher begins to open business negotiations, he asks him abruptly to leave them alone. Helena asks, “Who wrote that music?” He tells her a ghastly story of a titan soul who starved in a garret and shot himself, crushed by the mockery of the world. “I might have saved him!” the boy exclaims. “I was so busy with the music I forgot the man!” They talk about this epoch-making _concerto_, and how Lloyd means to force it upon the public. “And you shall play it with me!” he exclaims. “You are the first that has ever understood it!” “I cannot play it!” she protests; to which he answers, “It was like his voice come back from the grave!” And so we see these two souls cast into the crucible together. Section 4. The second act showed the aftermath of the great concert, and took place in the drawing-room of the Hartman family’s apartment, at four o’clock in the morning. We see Moses and the two professors, who have not been able to tear themselves away; dishevelled, _distrait_, wild with vexation, they pace about and lament. Failure, utter ruin confronts them--the structure of their hopes lies in the dust! They blame it all on “that woman”--and members of the family concur in this. It was she who kept Lloyd to his resolve to play that mad _concerto;_ and then, to cast aside all the master had taught them, all the results of weeks of drilling--and to play it in that frantic, demonic fashion. Now the men await the morning papers, which will bring them the verdict of “the world”; and they shudder with the foreknowledge of what that verdict will be. Lloyd and Helena enter. They have been walking for hours, and have not been thinking of “the world”. They listen, half-heeding, to the protests and laments; they could not help it, they explain--the music took hold of them. The two professors go off to get the papers, and Moses goes into the next room to rest; after which it becomes clear to the audience that Lloyd and Helena are fighting the sex-duel. “You do not care about people,” she is saying, sombrely. To which his reply is, “It is not to be found in people.” “And yet from people it must come!” she insists. He answers, “They do not even know what I mean; and they have no humility.” “It is a problem,” Lloyd continues, after a pause. “Shall one go on alone, or wait and bring others with him?--You have brought that problem into my life.” She answers to this, “I cannot see how my love will hinder you.” He replies, “If you love _me_, who will love my art?”