There were murmurs of talk and laughter in the hall. He sat still, hugging his melancholy. But when the door opened he rose quickly, instinctively, and, at the sight of the girl coming in so timidly behind Mrs. Mulholland, her eyes searching the half-lit room, and the smile, in them and on her lips, held back till she knew whether her poor friend could bear with smiles, Otto’s black hour began to lift. He let himself, at least, be welcomed and petted; and when fresh tea had been brought in, and the room was full of talk, he lay back in his chair, listening, the deep lines in his forehead gradually relaxing. He was better, he declared, a great deal better; in fact there was very little at all the matter with him. His symphony was to be given at the Royal College of Music early in the year. Everybody had been awfully decent about it. And he had begun a nocturne that amused him. As for the doctors, he repeated petulantly that they were all fools—it was only a question of degree. He intended to manage his life as he pleased in spite of them. Connie sat on a high stool near him while he talked. She seemed to be listening, but he once or twice thought, resentfully, that it was a perfunctory listening. He wondered what else she was thinking about. The tea was cleared away. And presently the three others had disappeared. Otto and Constance were left alone. ‘I have been reading so much about Poland lately,’ said Constance suddenly. ‘Oh, Otto, some day you must show me Cracow!’ His face darkened. ‘I shall never see Cracow again. I shall never see it with you.’ ‘Why not? Let’s dream!’ The smiling tenderness in her eyes angered him. She was treating him like a child; she was so sure he never could—or never would—make love to her! ‘I shall never go to Cracow,’ he said, with energy, ‘not even with you. I was to have gone—a year from now. It was all arranged. We have relations there—and I have friends there—musicians. The _chef d’orchestre_—at the Opera House—he was one of my teachers in Paris. Before next year, I was to have written a concerto on some of our Polish songs—there are scores of them that Liszt and Chopin never discovered. Not love-songs, mind you!—songs of revolution—battle-songs.’ His eyes lit up and he began to hum an air—to Polish words—that even as given out in his small tenor voice, stirred like a trumpet. ‘Fine!’ said Constance. ‘Ah, but you can’t judge—you don’t know the words. The words are splendid. It’s “Ujejski’s Hymn”—the Galician Hymn of ’46.’ And he fell to intoning. ‘Amid the smoke of our homes that burn, From the dust where our brothers lie bleeding, Our cry goes up to Thee, oh God!’ ‘There!—that’s something like it.’ And he ran on with a breathless translation of the ‘Z dymen posarow,’ the famous dirge for the Galician rebels of ’46, in which a devastated land wails like Rachel for her children. Suddenly a sound—a sound reedy and clear, like a beautiful voice in the distance. ‘Constance!’