The girl too had risen. She came forward as if in a dream and reverently
touched the arm of the musician, who paused now, and was looking at them
from under his long eyelashes. She said whisperingly: "Are you a spirit?
Do you come from the Hills of the Mighty Men?"

He answered gravely: "I am no spirit. But I have journeyed in the Hills
of the Mighty Men and along their ancient hunting-grounds. This that I
have played is the ancient music of the world--the music of Jubal and his
comrades. It comes humming from the Poles; it rides laughing down the
planets; it trembles through the snow; it gives joy to the bones of the
wind. . . . And I am the voice of it," he added; and he drew up his
loose unmanageable body till it looked enormous, firm, and dominant.

The girl's fingers ran softly over to his breast. "I will follow you,"
she said, "when you go again to the Happy Valleys."

Down from his brow there swept a faint hue of colour, and, for a breath,
his eyes closed tenderly with hers. But he straightway gathered back his
look again, his body shrank, not rudely, from her fingers, and he
absently said: "I am old-in years the father of the world. It is a man's
life gone since, at Genoa, she laid her fingers on my breast like that.
. . . These things can be no more . . . until the North hath its
summer again; and I stand young--the Master--upon the summits of my
renown."

The girl drew slowly back. Lazenby was muttering under his breath now;
he was overwhelmed by this change in Wine Face. He had been impressed to
awe by the Tall Master's music, but he was piqued, and determined not to
give in easily. He said sneeringly that Maskelyne and Cooke in music had
come to life, and suggested a snake-dance.