“One moment,” said the Master. “There is something I do not understand. That adagio is one of the most beautiful things ever written. It is full of one heartache and has in it many tears. Your aunt, you say, lies dead in your house, and yet you play it like one machine. I cannot see! Perhaps you had quarrelled?”
“No,” returned Lynn, in astonishment, “I was very, very fond of her.”
There was a long silence, then the Master sighed. “The thing means more than the person,” he said. “Whoever is dead, if it is only one little bird, it should make you feel sad. But it waits. Before you have finished, the world will do one of three things to you. It will make your heart very soft, very hard, or else break it, so. No one escapes.”
“By the way,” began Lynn, eager to change the subject, “Doctor Brinkerhoff told me to ask you to come and play at the funeral to-morrow at four o’clock. He said it was his wish.”
The Master’s face was troubled. “Once,” he said, “I promised one very angry lady that I would not go in that house again, and I have kept mine word. It was only once I went, but that was too much. Still, it was twenty-five years and more past, and she has long since been dead. Death frees one from a promise, is it not so?”
“Of course,” replied Lynn, vaguely.
“At any rate, mine friend, the Herr Doctor, has asked it, even after he has known of mine promise, and, of a surety, he is wiser than I. I will come, at four, with mine violin.”
Lynn took the long way home, his sunny nature deeply disturbed. “What is it?” he vainly asked of himself. “Am I different from everybody else? They all seem to know something that I do not.”
Iris kept her long vigil by Aunt Peace, her grief too great for her starved body to withstand. At the sound of a fall, Doctor Brinkerhoff left his post and hurried upstairs. Margaret was there almost as soon as he was. Iris had fainted.