His strength assailed her, and going about her unsettled routines in the early February cold she rested upon his decision where it suffused her mind. She thought of her grandfather as the chief witness of her achievement with the fiddle; he represented a throng of watchers, there to scrutinize her skill. She held inwardly an intense wish to show him what the fiddle could do in her hands, and as she brought a study to completion and played it with her master she thought of Anthony as the listener, as he was, as he sat over his mellow fire, or she would stop often by his chair and talk with him of the music, retelling all or much of what the teacher had brought her in interpretation. Or, remembering that the music must come out of the spirit, the soul, she would search inwardly for some token or glimpse of this shadowy substance, this delicate eidolon. The question arose again and again. The soul, where and what was it? She observed that the preachers in the churches had souls for their commerce, and that there one learned that all souls were of equal value. But in the novel or the poem the lover said, “I love you from the depths of my soul,” or the author said, “He was stirred to the depths of his soul,” or “He was frightened in his soul.” Striving to divide her being, to set bounds upon parts, she would turn a half-whimsical gaze inward as she strove to achieve the singing tone and to bow the indefinite legato. “Does the music come out of me really, out of some inner unit, myself, all mine?” she would question, “or do I simply imitate, skilfully or not, what the teacher does?” She wanted to lay her finger on this integer and say, “This is mine.” She wanted to go past the bounding of blood in arteries and the throb of her pride in her grandfather’s witnessing of her advancing skill. The tone sang more true and she took a great, impatient joy in it, searching, as she was, more deeply for the answer to the riddle. Or, in the coming of Albert into her senses, her questioning thought would swim in a pool of inattention and semi-consciousness. * * * * *