The girls were all settling down to fancy work, the white-cuffed hands of the Martins were already jerking crochet needles, faces were bending over fine embroideries and Minna Blum had trundled a mounted lace-pillow into the brighter light. Miriam went to the schoolroom and fetched from her work-basket the piece of canvas partly covered with red and black wool in diamond pattern that was her utmost experience of fancy work. As she returned she half saw Fräulein Pfaff, sitting as if enthroned on a high-backed chair in front of the centremost of the mirrors filling the wall spaces between the long French windows, signal to her, to come to that side of the room. Timorously ignoring the signal she got herself into a little low chair in the shadow of the half-closed swing door and was spreading out her woolwork on her knee when the Vorspielen began. Emma Bergmann was playing. The single notes of the opening _motif_ of Chopin's Fifteenth Nocturne fell pensively into the waitingroom. Miriam, her fatigue forgotten, slid to a featureless freedom. It seemed to her that the light with which the room was filled grew brighter and clearer. She felt that she was looking at nothing and yet was aware of the whole room like a picture in a dream. Fear left her. The human forms all round her lost their power. They grew suffused and dim.... The pensive swing of the music changed to urgency and emphasis.... It came nearer and nearer. It did not come from the candle-lit corner where the piano was.... It came from everywhere. It carried her out of the house, out of the world. It hastened with her, on and on towards great brightness.... Everything was growing brighter and brighter.... Gertrude Goldring, the Australian, was making noises with her hands like inflated paper bags being popped. Miriam clutched her wool-needle and threaded it. She drew the wool through her canvas, one, three, five, three, one and longed for the piano to begin again. 7