Impulse was boiling up in Heath. After all that had happened that night he felt as if he could not go to bed without accomplishing some decisive action. Powers were on tiptoe within him surely ready for the giant leap. He got up, went to the piano, went to his writing-table, fingered the manuscript paper covered with tiny notes which lay scattered upon it. But, no, it would be absurd, mad, to begin to work at such an hour. And, beside, he could not work. He could not be patient. He wanted to do something with a rush, to change his life in a moment, to take a leap forward, as Sennier had done that night, a leap from shadow into light. He wanted to grasp something, to have a new experience. All the long refusal of his life, which had not seemed to cost him very much till this moment, abruptly, revengefully attacked him in the very soul, crying: "You must pay for me! Pay! Pay!" He hated the thought of his remote and solitary life. He hated the memory of the lonely evenings passed in the study of scores, or in composition, by the lamp that shed a restricted light. The dazzle of the Covent Garden lamps was still in his eyes. He longed, he lusted for fame. Afterwards he said to himself: "That night I was 'out' of myself." Charmian had spurred his nature. It tingled still. There had been something that was almost like venom in that whisper of hers, which yet surely showed her love. Perhaps instinctively she knew that he needed venom, and that she alone could supply it. The strangest thing of all was that she had never heard his music, knew nothing at first hand of his talent, yet believed in it with such vital force, such completeness. There was something almost great in that. She was a woman who absolutely trusted her instinct. And her instinct must have told her that in him, Claude Heath, there was some particle of greatness. He loved her just then for that. "Oh--and good-night, Mr. Heath." Claude's cheeks burned as if Paul Lane had laid a whip across them. Again, as when he first entered it that night, he looked at the big room. How had he ever been able to think it cosy, home-like? It was dreary, forbidding, the sad hermitage of one who was resolved to turn his back on life, on the true life of close human relations, of inspiring intimacies, of that intercourse which should be as bread of Heaven to the soul. It was a hateful room. Nothing great, nothing to reach the hearts of men could be conceived, brought to birth in its atmosphere. Jacques Sennier, shut in alone, could never have written his opera here. In vain to try.