All this stewed and seethed in Michael’s mind as he sat that night by the window looking out on to the silent and empty street. His thoughts flowed without check or guide from his will, wandering wherever their course happened to take them, now lingering, like the water of a river in some deep, still pool, when he thought of the friendship that had come into his life, now excitedly plunging down the foam of swift-flowing rapids in the exhilaration of his newly-found liberty, now proceeding with steady current at the thought of the weeks of unremitting industry at a beloved task that lay in front of him. He could form no definite image out of these which should represent his ordinary day; it was all lost in a bright haze through which its shape was but faintly discernible; but life lay in front of him with promise, a thing to be embraced and greeted with welcome and eager hands, instead of being a mere marsh through which he had to plod with labouring steps, a business to be gone about without joy and without conviction in its being worth while. He wondered for a moment, as he rose to go to bed, what his feelings would have been if, at the end of his performance on the sore-throated and voiceless piano, Falbe had said: “I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything with you.” As he knew, Falbe intended for the future only to take a few pupils, and chiefly devote himself to his own practice with a view to emerging as a concert-giver the next winter; and as Michael had sat down, he remembered telling himself that there was really not the slightest chance of his friend accepting him as a pupil. He did not intend that this rejection should make the smallest difference to his aim, but he knew that he would start his work under the tremendous handicap of Falbe not believing that he had it in him to play, and under the disappointment of not enjoying the added intimacy which work with and for Falbe would give him. Then he had engaged in this tussle with refractory notes till he quite lost himself in what he was playing, and thought no more either of Falbe or the piano, but only of what the melody meant to him. But at the end, when he came to himself again, and sat with dropped hands waiting for Falbe’s verdict, he remembered how his heart seemed to hang poised until it came. He had rehearsed again to himself his fixed determination that he would play and could play, whatever his friend might think about it; but there was no doubt that he waited with a greater suspense than he had ever known in his life before for that verdict to be made known to him.