What appealed to Nigel was never the technique of a composition, but its emotional quality. Music was to him not so much sound as feeling--he did not value a piece for its own intrinsic beauty, but for the emotions it was able to call forth. As he played that morning whole cycles of experience passed before him. All the old dreams that for three years had lain dead in his violin now revived--but a new quality was added to them, a soft twang of sorrow. Before his imprisonment his dreams had been winged and shod with fire, wild things compounded of desire and endeavour, tender only in their background of the seasons' moods, rain and sunshine and wind and shadows and stars. But to-day longing took in them the place of endeavour, and all their desire was for forgetfulness. Stars and rain were in them still, but the stars and rain of the new heavens and the new earth which suffering had created--the rain which is tears, and the stars which spring from the dumb desire of sorrow brooding over the formless deep of its own immensity--"Let there be light." And there was light--one or two faint dream-like constellations, burning over and reflected in the swirling waters of the abyss.... A great wind passed over the face of the waters, and parted them, and out of them rose a little island for a man to stand upon--so the dry land came out of the water. And the suffering man can stand on the island, where there is just room for his feet, and he can see the stars above him--and when he is too weary to lift his head he sees them reflected in the surging waters beneath.... Nigel dropped his violin, and looked out with dream-filled eyes at the fields, seen dimly through the rain-drops dripping from the eaves. In the front garden stood a little girl--a little dirty girl with a milk-can. "Hullo!" said Nigel. He felt an unaccountable desire to talk to this child; not because he liked her particularly--indeed, she was rather an unattractive object--but because he realised suddenly that he was very fond of children. He had never known it before, never imagined that he cared about kids; but, whether it was his long exile in prison he could not tell, he felt quite overwhelmed this morning by his love for them, and realised that he absolutely must make friends with the highly unfavourable specimen before him. "Hullo!" he repeated. The maiden vouchsafed no reply. "Have you come for the milk?" he asked conversationally. She nodded. Then she pointed to his violin. "Did the noise come out of that box?" "Yes--would you like to hear it again?" "No." He was not to be daunted. "Come in, and I'll show you a pussy." "Is there a pussy in that box?" "No--but there's a beauty in the chair by the fire."