however, when unobserved, he swept the three listeners with a rapid
glance. Maurice Guest was quite carried away; he had never heard
playing like this, and he leaned forward in his seat, and gazed full
at the player, in open admiration. But his neighbour, a pale, thin
man, with one of those engaging and not uncommon faces which, in mould
of feature, in mildness of expression, and still more in the cut of
hair and beard, bear so marked a likeness to the conventional
Christ-portrait: this neighbour looked on with only a languid
interest, which seemed unable to get the upper hand of melancholy
thoughts. Maurice, who believed his feelings shared by all about him,
was chilled by such indifference: he only learned later, after they
had become friends, that nothing roused in Boehmer a real or lasting
interest, save what he, Boehmer, did himself. Dove sat absorbed, as
reverent as if at prayer; but there were also moments when, with his
head a little on one side, he wore an anxious air, as if not fully at
one with the player's rendering; others again, after a passage of
peculiar brilliancy, when he threw at Schwarz a humbly grateful look.
While Schwarz, the sonata over, was busy with his pencil on the margin
of the music, Dove leaned over to Maurice and whispered behind his
hand: "Furst--our best pianist."

Now came the turn of the others, and the master's attention wandered;
he stretched himself, yawned, and sighed aloud, then, in the search
for something he could not find, turned out on the lid of the second
piano the contents of sundry pockets. While Dove played, he wrote as
if for life in a bulky notebook.

Maurice remarked this without being properly conscious of it, so
impressed had he been by the sonata. The exultant beauty of the
great final theme had permeated his every fibre, inciting him,