So Sonia opened the manuscript at random and played, and again it was an echo of Geoffrey's symphony. He sank on a chair like a man crushed by an overwhelming fatality, and held his head in his hands. "I oughtn't to have done it," he groaned. "But it was more than me. The thing overmastered me, it haunted me so that I couldn't sleep, and the more it haunted me the more it became my own, my very own. It was too big to lose." Sonia held him with scared eyes. "What are you talking of?" she asked. "The way I came to write the Symphony. It's like a nightmare." He rose. "A couple of years ago," said he, "I bought a bundle of old music at a second-hand shop. It contained a collection of eighteenth-century stuff which I wanted. I took the whole lot, and on going through it, found a clump of old, discoloured manuscript partly in faded brown ink, partly in pencil. It was mostly rough notes. I tried it out of curiosity. The composition was feeble and the orchestration childish--I thought it the work of some dead and forgotten amateur--but it was crammed full of ideas, crammed full of beauty. I began tinkering it about, to amuse myself. The more I worked on it the more it fascinated me. It became an obsession. Then I pitched the old score away and started it on my own." "The _maestro_ sold a lot of old music about that time," said Sonia. The young man threw up his hands. "It's a fatality, an awful fatality. My God," he cried, "to think that I of all men should have stolen Angelo Fardetti's music!" "No wonder he fainted yesterday," said Sonia. It was catastrophe. Both regarded it in remorseful silence. Sonia said at last: "You'll have to explain." "Of course, of course. But what must the dear old fellow be thinking of me? What else but that I've got hold of this surreptitiously, while he was out of the room? What else but that I'm a mean thief?" "He loves you, dear, enough to forgive you anything." "It's the Unforgivable Sin. I'm wiped out. I cease to exist as an honest man. But I had no idea," he cried, with the instinct of self-defence, "that I had come so near him. I thought I had just got a theme here and there. I thought I had recast all the odds and ends according to my own scheme." He ran his eye over a page or two of the score. "Yes, this is practically the same as the old rough notes. But there was a lot, of course, I couldn't use. Look at that, for instance." He indicated a passage. "I can't read it like you," said Sonia. "I must play it." She turned again to the piano, and played the thin, uninspired music that had no relation to the Symphony in E flat, and her eyes filled with tears as she remembered poignantly what the old man had told her of his Song of Life. She went on and on until the music quickened into one of the familiar themes; and the tears fell, for she knew how poorly it was treated.