'That is only a phrase! Save when Liszt passes by here I never hear such music as yours.'
'He obeyed her, and played and sang many and very different things.
At last he rose a little abruptly.
Two hours had gone by since they had entered the octagon chamber.
'It would be commonplace to thank you,' she murmured with a little hesitation. 'You have a great gift; one of all gifts the most generous to others.'
He made a gesture of repudiation, and walked across to a spinet of the fifteenth century, inlaid with curious devices by Martin Pacher of Brauneck, and having a painting of his in its lid.
'What a beautiful old box,' he said, as he touched it. 'Has it any sound, I wonder? If one be disposed to be sad, surely of all sad things an old spinet is the saddest! To think of the hands that have touched, of the children that have danced to it, of the tender old ballads that have been sung to the notes that to us seem so hoarse and so faulty! All the musicians dead, dead so long ago, and the old spinet still answering when anyone calls! Shall I sing you a madrigal to it?'
Very tenderly, very lightly, he touched the ivory keys of the painted toy of the ladies so long dead and gone, and he sang in a minor key the sweet, sad, quaint poem:—
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
That ballad of fair women echoed softly through the stillness of the chamber, touched with the sobbing notes of the spinet, even as it might have been in the days of its writer: