father, an honest subordinate in a court of justice. In fact, Czepanek had been forced into marriage by half the city, which otherwise would have ostracised the seducer and ousted him from his soft berth.

Happier she could not be, that she knew. Of the nameless misfortune bound to come she had not the least presentiment; and when it came she took it without complaint; she loved him so very much, she regarded it as the natural indemnity for the unnatural gift of having possessed him.

Yet he would come back in spite of all. Whether he wished to or not, he would come. She had in her possession a pledge which chained him to her for all time, and which, sooner or later, must force him to cross her threshold.

It was not Lilly. True, he loved his child, loved her with a tenderness strangely compounded of pleasure in a toy for idle hours, and of aesthetic delight in her inner and outer loveliness. But for a real father's love, she knew, there was no room in his gypsy heart. Even in hours when he would feel himself most alone and abandoned, the thought would never occur to him to seek solace and comfort with a child of his.

But the wife had something else in her keeping which gave her a far stronger hold upon him—a roll of music; that was all. He might easily have put it in the bag with which he had departed on his great journey. In fact, he had attempted to. But so great at the decisive moment was his desire to escape that he did not dare to face his suspicious wife.

This roll of music contained everything that had linked his past with his future during the fifteen years of his Philistine life, everything remaining from the titanic storm and stress of his youth, from the giddy hopes and ambitions of the days when he starved.

This roll of music—it was slender enough—contained the work of his life; it contained the Song of Songs.

Since Lilly could think, nothing in the world had been spoken of with such respect, with such tender and reverent awe, as this work, of which, with the exception of the two women, no one knew a note.

It was something that had never yet been, something unheard of, a new world of sound, the beginning of a musical development, of which the end was lost in the twilight of mystic anticipation.

The opera had reached its culmination in Wagner, the road from which pointed straight down into the abyss; symphonic composition no longer answered modern requirements for sense music; the song had been split up by the newest school into a series of small subtle effects. The art of the future belonged to the oratorio, but not that constrained wooden production hitherto suffered to pass by the name from a false belief that we have to make concessions to a misunderstood ecclesiasticism, but—and here it was that the new world of sound, the Song of Songs, began.

The score had been completed years ago. To entrust it to the heavy execution of the musicians of Czepanek's provincial town would have been desecration. So it lay there and lay there, and interwove the day with a mild, mysterious light, which no one saw, yet every one felt. It shot rays of light into the distant future, and so filled a child's palpitating heart with anticipation, prayer and love that that heart would rather have stood still than exist without this fountain of the good and the noble, from which the acting forces of life daily drew their sustenance.

For Lilly the roll of music lying in the upper drawer of the linen chest, held together by two rubber bands, was a kind of household divinity, which gave purity and sanctity to the home. She had imbibed reverence for the sheets of paper, scrawled over with curly-headed runes, since the dawn of her recollections, and their music was familiar to her from her early childhood.

Papa, it is true, did not like to have the themes of his creation bandied about in everyday life. "Why don't you sing 'O du lieber Augustin' or 'Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan?'" he used to say when he caught one of them dreamily humming his arias. "They are plenty good enough for you."

Later his warnings grew unnecessary. Mama gradually forgot everything sounding like a song, and Lilly withdrew more and more into herself.

She had arranged a sort of mass from the Song of Songs, which she celebrated before the mirror when she knew she was alone in the house. She draped a sheet about her waist like a skirt, hung window-curtains over her shoulders, wound old lace about her neck, and wove spangles taken from shoes into her hair. Singing, weeping, and uttering shouts of joy, with genuflections, magic dances and airy embraces, she lived through Sulamith's bridal yearning and ecstasy as awakened to life again in papa's Song of Songs after a slumber of twenty-five hundred years.

The manuscript of this song became the anchor to which the hopes of Kilian Czepanek's family were henceforth fastened. It was conceivable that he, a vagabond, cast out by his own parents when a child, might abandon wife and daughter to want and pining—but to believe that he would desert the work of his lifetime, the sword wherewith he was to fight his way back into the great world, was sheer folly.

And while the sewing-machine whizzed and whirred day and night in the attic to which Mrs. Czepanek and her daughter had removed, while the body of the forsaken woman dried up entirely and grew ever more deformed, and the layer of paint with which she kept herself young rested upon cheekbones sharpening from week to week, there lay in the upper drawer of the linen chest (the chest had been saved from bankruptcy) an earnest of future reunion, working miracles by its proximity, the Song of Songs.

CHAPTER III

Lilly was now a tall young woman with a well-developed figure for her age, who carried her school-bag through the streets with the air of a princess.

Her plaid dress of mixed wool was always wrinkled by rain, and despite the let-out tucks was ever too short. Her rainy-day boots went to the cobbler time and again, and between the wavy ends of her cotton gloves and the hems of her sleeves laboriously stretched to meet them, gleamed a strip of red, slender arm.

But whoever saw her come down the street with the easy swing of her beautifully curved hips, with the careless, rhythmic tread of exuberant youth and strength, with the mobile head, too small for her tall body, set on a long neck, with the two mouse teeth that looked out eagerly from behind an upper lip somewhat too short, and with the two famous "Lilly eyes"—he who saw her did not think of the shabbiness of her dress, did not suspect that this delicately shaped, broad breast was bent for hours and hours over sewing, that this whole glorious, youthful organism, whose sap, as it chased through her veins, manifested itself in causeless blushings and passionate palings, was grandly maintained and preserved on boiled potatoes, bread spread with clarified fat, and bad sausage.

The high school students followed her all afire, and for a long time the poems composed in her praise in the first year class were to be counted by the dozen.

It cannot be said that she remained indifferent to their homage. When a troop of them came toward her on the street she felt as if a rosy veil were descending over her eyes from shame and dread; and when the young men passed by, doffing their caps—they had met her at the skating-rink—she was overcome by giddiness, or a sinking sensation, so suddenly did the blood mount to her head. The aftertaste of the meetings was delicious. For hours she recalled the picture of the young man who had greeted her most respectfully, or the one who had blushed like herself. That was the one she loved—until at the next encounter he was replaced by another.

Despite her adorers she was subjected to less teasing by her schoolmates than is usual in such cases. The contented defencelessness of her manner disarmed all enmity. If they hid her school-bag she merely entreated, "Please give it back to