It was not Lilly. True, he loved his child, loved her with a tenderness strangely compounded of pleasure in a toy for idle hours, and of aesthetic delight in her inner and outer loveliness. But for a real father's love, she knew, there was no room in his gypsy heart. Even in hours when he would feel himself most alone and abandoned, the thought would never occur to him to seek solace and comfort with a child of his. But the wife had something else in her keeping which gave her a far stronger hold upon him--a roll of music; that was all. He might easily have put it in the bag with which he had departed on his great journey. In fact, he had attempted to. But so great at the decisive moment was his desire to escape that he did not dare to face his suspicious wife. This roll of music contained everything that had linked his past with his future during the fifteen years of his Philistine life, everything remaining from the titanic storm and stress of his youth, from the giddy hopes and ambitions of the days when he starved. This roll of music--it was slender enough--contained the work of his life; it contained the Song of Songs. Since Lilly could think, nothing in the world had been spoken of with such respect, with such tender and reverent awe, as this work, of which, with the exception of the two women, no one knew a note. It was something that had never yet been, something unheard of, a new world of sound, the beginning of a musical development, of which the end was lost in the twilight of mystic anticipation. The opera had reached its culmination in Wagner, the road from which pointed straight down into the abyss; symphonic composition no longer answered modern requirements for sense music; the song had been split up by the newest school into a series of small subtle effects. The art of the future belonged to the oratorio, but not that constrained wooden production hitherto suffered to pass by the name from a false belief that we have to make concessions to a misunderstood ecclesiasticism, but--and here it was that the new world of sound, the Song of Songs, began. The score had been completed years ago. To entrust it to the heavy execution of the musicians of Czepanek's provincial town would have been desecration. So it lay there and lay there, and interwove the day with a mild, mysterious light, which no one saw, yet every one felt. It shot rays of light into the distant future, and so filled a child's palpitating heart with anticipation, prayer and love that that heart would rather have stood still than exist without this fountain of the good and the noble, from which the acting forces of life daily drew their sustenance.