Laura lay back in a long chair close at hand. The moment was propitious. The artist's profile silhouetted itself against the shade of a light that burned at the side of the organ, and that gave light to the keyboard. And on this keyboard, full in the reflection, lay his long, slim hands. They were the only things that moved in the room, and the chords and bars of Mendelssohn's "Consolation" seemed, as he played, to flow, not from the instrument, but, like some invisible ether, from his finger-tips themselves. "You hear," he said to Laura, "the effect of questions and answer in this. The questions are passionate and tumultuous and varied, but the answer is always the same, always calm and soothing and dignified." She answered with a long breath, speaking just above a whisper: "Oh, yes, yes, I understand." He finished and turned towards her a moment. "Possibly not a very high order of art," he said; "a little too 'easy,' perhaps, like the Bougereau, but 'Consolation' should appeal very simply and directly, after all. Do you care for Beethoven?" "I--I am afraid--" began Laura, but he had continued without waiting for her reply. "You remember this? The 'Appassionata,' the F minor sonata just the second movement." But when he had finished Laura begged him to continue. "Please go on," she said. "Play anything. You can't tell how I love it." "Here is something I've always liked," he answered, turning back to the keyboard. "It is the 'Mephisto Walzer' of Liszt. He has adapted it himself from his own orchestral score, very ingeniously. It is difficult to render on the organ, but I think you can get the idea of it." As he spoke he began playing, his head very slightly moving to the rhythm of the piece. At the beginning of each new theme, and without interrupting his playing, he offered a word, of explanation: "Very vivid and arabesque this, don't you think? ... And now this movement; isn't it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates and then takes the leap? Yet there's a certain nobility there, a feeling for ideals. You see it, of course.... And all the while this undercurrent of the sensual, and that feline, eager sentiment ... and here, I think, is the best part of it, the very essence of passion, the voluptuousness that is a veritable anguish.... These long, slow rhythms, tortured, languishing, really dying. It reminds one of 'Phedre'--'Venus toute entiere,' and the rest of it; and Wagner has the same. You find it again in Isolde's motif continually."