To Lilly his standing before the mirror was a familiar sight. It was his manner of squaring accounts for his lost life and wasted love, his manner of charming back the great world, in which duchesses and prima donnas yearningly cherished the memory of their vanished idol. He stood there like an elderly god of love, with small alcoholic puffs under his eyes, and a tendency toward a paunch. Both mama and Lilly cared for him with unremitting zeal. They regarded him as a sort of bird of paradise, who by a lucky chance had been caught between the walls of a room, and who required the greatest effort, the utmost circumspection, to keep him safe in the cage. By right, Lilly should long ago have been sitting at the piano, for in the house of Czepanek a quiet keyboard was a waste of time and a sin before the Lord. She had to practice four or five hours every day. Often when her father was seized by the holy spirit of creativeness and forgot the time set aside for her practicing, she did not begin until nearly midnight. Then she sat at the piano frozen, with heavy eyes, striking out in all directions until the small hours of the morning. Sometimes her mother found her the next day lying with her arms crossed on the keyboard in that profound child's sleep from which there is almost no rousing. Thus it happened that she cared little for the artistic future for which her father's ambition had destined her. She preferred to dally with some old forbidden book, and often drove her father to despair by a false pretence at cleverness in playing at first sight. But to-day she had the Sonata Pathétique to do, and there is no trifling with that, as any babe in arms knows. So she was just about to interrupt her father as he stood there plunged in dreamy self-observation, when she heard a click at the door from the kitchen. She bounded away from the keyhole with one great leap of her long legs, and the next instant her mother entered, carrying the supper dishes. The mother's prematurely faded cheeks were now glowing from the heat of the kitchen fire. She held her lean figure erect, taut as a whip cord, which seemed to be tied in a knot at the abdomen by a protrusion, the result of abortive child-bearing. Dull marital sorrow had long ago transformed her eyes, once beautiful, into two lustreless slits. But at this moment they were beaming with pride and expectation. For to-day Mrs. Czepanek hoped to satisfy her lord and his palate. At the clatter of the plates on the table, the door to the parlour opened, and papa's dark curly head, about which the evening sunlight cast a halo, appeared in the bright opening. "The deuce, supper already?" he said, and his eyes wandered with a peculiar, confused gaze. "In ten minutes," the mother replied, joy at the surprise in store for him playing about her parched, chapped lips like secret bliss. He entered the room, took a few deep breaths, and said with the air of a man to whom speech comes hard: