But it was not so for the most part. He hated the houses in their common, hard aspect of nearness and oppression. Only when the rain fell thickly, spouting from their eaves and gutters, and half hiding them behind a veil of dropping water, or when the snow, clinging to their sills and window-frames, seemed to cut them into sugared sections, could he endure to look on them without impatience. They were the jealous barriers which imprisoned him from the infinite. Some boys, so conditioned, would have found their main pathetic interest in such sights and sounds of outer life as might penetrate to them in their isolation. It was not so with him. His spirit, like an entombed flower, yearned always towards the light, stretching pallidly in a vain passion to attain the blue heaven of health and freedom. Perhaps, strange little soul, he was happiest in those long moonlit nights when, the curtains being drawn about the lower casement, he and his jewelled book of stories in the window were left alone together. Then he would lie for hours, quite motionless, as if hypnotized, his eyes fixed on the dimly luminous scroll, dreaming what unearthly dreams only the painted heads themselves might tell. He liked to hear the watchman crying out the hours, hollow and mysterious, in the streets below; he loved to see by day the not unrare vision of a pigeon pecking and preening on his window-sill, or the shadow of a hopping sparrow cross the panes. Those were his events, until the harp came. And then all at once he was transformed. Some long-dumb chord in his soul leaped and vibrated to the rapture with a force that shook the life out of him. I think that was the truth. He died to all intents of joy. The frail frame could not stand the exquisite tension of the bliss evoked in it. Now, in the days of that brief friendship, scarce one day passed but found the boy and man at some time together. There was no more midnight playing; but Bannister would look in as occasion offered, and mostly with his instrument accompanying. Then there would be sweet music a spell, and talk a spell, and perhaps unutterable silences to link them. Somehow it suggested the soul affinity, formal but transcendent, between a dying saint and his confessor. There was a subtle thrill in the atmosphere, of which all were conscious--Bannister himself, the father, the woman with the hard, pathetic face, whose eyes were always hidden by her hand when she was privileged to listen to the music. They felt it like an unseen presence--a sense of warning, of change, as when one feels spring moving in the grass under one’s feet. And not one would own to itself that it knew. Yet they all knew.