what is more, she came up to his very side. He turned away so hastily
that he touched her arm, causing it to yield a little, and some
moments went by before he ventured to look again. When he did, in some
tremor, he saw that, without fear of discovery, he might look as long
or as often as he chose. She was listening to the player with the
raptness of a painted saint: her whole face listened, the tightened
lips, the open nostrils, the wide, vigilant eyes. Maurice, lost in her
presence, grew dizzy with the scent of her hair--that indefinable
odour, which has something of the raciness in it of new-turned
earth--and foolish wishes arose and jostled one another in his mind: he
would have liked to plunge both hands into the dark, luxuriant mass;
still better, cautiously to draw his palm down this whitest skin,
which, seen so near, had a faint, satin-like sheen. The mere
imagining of it set him throbbing, and the excitement in his blood was
heightened by the sensuous melancholy of the violin, which, just
beyond the pale of his consciousness, throbbed and languished with him
under the masterful bow.

Shortly before the end of the concerto, she turned and made her way
out. Maurice let a few seconds elapse, then followed. But the long
white corridors stretched empty before him; there was no trace of her
to he seen. As he was peering about, in places that were strange to
him, a tumult of applause shook the hall, the doors flew open and the
audience poured out.

Dove had joined other friends, and a number of them left the building
together; everyone spoke loudly and at once. But soon Maurice and Dove
outstepped their companions, for these came to words over the means
used by Schilsky to mount, with bravour, a certain gaudy scale of
octaves, and, at every second pace, they stopped, and wheeled round