The count laughed lightly.
"As you like." He held out a hand. "Good night, my friend," he said cordially. "You are a strange man."
The grotesque, sensitive face opposite him quivered. The big lips trembled a little as they opened.
"I am not a strange man," said Schubert vehemently. "That music—it was—the devil!"
The count laughed again lightly. He held out his hand.
"Good night," he said.
IV
A soft haze hung over Zelitz. The moonlight, filtering through it, touched the paths and shrubs with shifting radiance and lifted them out of shadow. Under the big trees the darkness lay black, but in the open spaces it had given way to a gray, elusive whiteness that came and went like a still breathing of the quiet night.