--_Faber._ GRAPES AND THORNS BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF YORKE." CHAPTER V. SHADOWS AND LILIES. Mr. Schöninger came early to the rehearsal that evening, and, in his stately fashion, made himself unusually agreeable. There was, perhaps, a very slight widening of the eyes, expressive of surprise, if not of displeasure, when he saw Miss Ferrier's critics, but his salutation did not lack any necessary courtesy. He did not lose his equanimity even when, later, while they were singing a fugue passage, a sonorous but stupid bass came in enthusiastically just one bar too soon. "I am glad you chose to do that to-night instead of to-morrow night, sir," the director said quietly. "Now we will try it again." And yet Mr. Schöninger was, in his profession, an object of terror to some of his pupils, and of scrupulous, if not anxious, attention to all; for not only did he possess notably that exalted musical sensitiveness which no true artist lacks, but he concealed under an habitual self-control, and great exactness in the discharge of his duty, a fiery impatience of temper, and a hearty dislike for the drudgery of his profession. "If your doctrines regarding future punishments are true," he once said to F. Chevreuse, "then the physical part of a musician's purgatory will be to listen to discords striving after, but never attaining to, harmony, and his hell to hear sublime harmonies rent and distorted by discords. I never come so near believing in an embodied spirit of evil as when I hear a masterpiece of one of the great composers mangled by a tyro. I haven't a doubt that Chopin or Schumann might be played so as to throw me into convulsions." And F. Chevreuse had answered after his kind: "And your spiritual purgatory, sir, will be the recollection of those long years during which you have persisted in playing with one thumb, as a bleak monody, that divine trio of which all the harmonies of the universe are but faint echoes." Nothing of this artistic irritability appeared to-night, as we have said. In its stead was a gentleness quite new in the musician's demeanor, and so slight as to be like that first film of coming verdure on the oak, when, some spring morning, one looks out and doubts whether it is a dimness of the eyes or the atmosphere, or a budding foliage which has set swimming those sharp outlines of branch and twig. "He is really human," Annette whispered to Miss Pembroke; and Honora smiled acquiescence, though she would scarcely have employed such an expression for her thought. She had already discovered in Mr. Schöninger a very gentle humanity.