Though all of Herr Bruckner's family were musical in their easy way, Kaethe had a real talent; she could not only play through by ear the latest operette, but Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, with a sure yet fiery touch. Eberhardt had played the 'cello since his boyhood. Sometimes Kaethe, her fingers tapping out a measure on the table after the piano went, would think with hot longing of certain quartettes to which those walls of hers had once resounded. Poor Amsel who led them ... his songs, written during a protracted period of starvation in a garret, were now being sung everywhere; but he had been killed on the Eastern front that very first month of the war,--he'd scarcely had time to send back a postcard,--and had been buried with his talent and a half a hundred luckless fellows in a huge mound, that had been promptly flattened and all trace of it obliterated by a retreating army. And Koellner, with his Amati violin. Kaethe often hummed a motif of that Mozart trio and thought of herself at the piano, Koellner swaying slimly, his eyes closed and the long black lock falling over his forehead,--they hadn't seen him after the signing of the Peace. As for Rosetti from Triest who played the viola, he hadn't been heard of since the day before the mobilization, certain rumors got around about him.... But all these things were really as distant to the Eberhardts as the Tertiary Period; they themselves had been thrown up by the convulsions of War and Peace into strangely diversified, completely unrelated strata. For a long time, however, those bright days had left the glow of their setting on the sombre war period. And then wars didn't last forever, and when over, except for mourning mothers, things would doubtless be as they had been. No one foresaw the Peace.... It had lasted four years, that first full, happy life, during which time Kaethe had had three children,--Lilli a pansy-eyed, pale-haired little girl, now grown too beautiful for safe adolescence, another clever, dark child, Resl, and Maxy who had been a "sugar baby" something to eat up, as he lay gurgling and cooing in his mother's arms. The pendulum of Eberhardt's life had swung unvaryingly between that beloved home and the equally beloved laboratory, where daily he pursued hotly, closely, certain secrets of nature, always enchantingly about to be caught; or with a warm note in his vibrant voice and a light in his grey, speculative eye, communicated to eager students those he had already seized....