Inevitably all this fervor and pathos, gratitude and adoration, were transmuted into a consciousness of music. He felt ever more strongly the artist's need of expression. Since he had never previously known such exaltation--or, indeed, such dejection--the music that he finally produced, his physical weakness notwithstanding, was music such as he had never written before. At Brantome's, when that piece was to be played for the first time, he sat in his wheel chair suffocated by sudden doubts, as if on trial for his life. Lilla sat beside him, her hand on his. No one else was there except Brantome, who bent over the manuscript his haggard old face, revealing nearly as much agitation as did David. At last, raising his head, the critic murmured: "You think this is going to be easy for me? Reflect on what I must do. To satisfy you I must take the rigidity out of all these ink marks, restore to this score the emotions that you felt in writing it." David responded: "The emotions that I felt in writing it are not there; for the idea always loses its original form the moment it is seized by the pen. That is the first loss. The second comes now. You cannot help it. It is the old misfortune, the inability to transmit what one feels, the isolation of the human soul. But nobody could play as well as you what's left of those thoughts of mine." The bullet-headed attendant appeared beside the wheel chair, a bottle of medicine and a glass of water in his hands. With that pretentious solicitude of his, he uttered: "It is time----" David Verne gave a shudder. "Ah! At this moment! Will you get out of the room?" And when the attendant had gone, "Is he, can he be, so stupid? I really think he does these things on purpose." Brantome poised his hands above the keyboard, leaned forward to peer at a legend scrawled faintly in the corner of the page, then, turning round on the piano bench, cast at Lilla: "Rose-covered Cypresses." "What?" she exclaimed, with a start. "He has called it that." The old Frenchman began to play. Not a song after all, but a piano concerto, it described in tone that goal of all human longings, the conquest of tragedy.