"Did you know," he went on, "that everything has a sound, just as it has a shape and colour of its own? Well, it has; and presently I seemed to be living in a strange new world, all full of music. Of course it wasn't really new. It was the same old world. Only, like most people, I had been almost deaf to it; and when I first heard it, up in that little temple, I nearly went mad with joy. Day after day and night after night I went out by myself and listened, and gradually I began to distinguish the separate sounds of things, like the notes of instruments in an orchestra."
He stopped for a moment.
"Just behind us, for instance, there's a clump of anemones singing next to some primroses."
Marian turned and saw them, just as he had said.
"Oh, I wish," she cried, "that I could hear them too."
The painter smiled.
"Wait for a moment," he said. "Well, then once more I began to grow miserable. For I was an artist, you see, and every artist wants to make other people see what he sees. That was why I had painted my pictures. But how could I make people hear what I heard? So I told the old priest about it, and he said that, if I were a real artist, the power would come back to me somehow. 'Wait a little,' he said, 'Stay a little longer. You've hardly begun yet to hear for yourself.'"
He paused again and lit his pipe.
"And at last it came to me," he said. "Hold my hand."
Marian slipped her hand into his.