"Beg pardon," he said, trying to put me aside to step ahead of me. I turned my head and over my shoulder looked him in the face.
"I beg your pardon."
"Oh!" he said. "How do? Let me by."
"To ply your old trade?" I asked, looking into his eyes, over my shoulder.
"Ah!" I saw the rage come into his face and he swore some foreign oath. He put his hand on my shoulder to push me aside; but I half turned and looked him straight in the eyes and his grasp relaxed. He had felt my grip once—and he knew I was not afraid of him, and thought I was a fool. And his hand fell.
I walked in front of him and kept him back until the party with my young lady in it had passed quite out of the door, and then I let him by. For that evening, at least, I had protected her.
I walked to my lodging with a feeling of more content than I had had in a long time. My heart had a home though I had none. It was as if the shell in which I had been cramped so long were broken and I should at last step out into a new world. I had a definite aim, and one higher than I ever had had before. I was in love with that girl and I made up my mind to win her. As I walked along through the gradually emptying streets my old professor's words came to me. They had been verified. I reviewed my past life and saw as clearly as if in a mirror my failures and false steps. I had moped and sulked with the world; I had sat in my cubby-hole of an office with all my talents as deeply buried as if I had been under the mounds of Troy, and had expected men to unearth me as though I had been treasure.
It may appear to some that I exaggerated my feeling for a girl whom I scarcely knew at all. But love is the least conventional of passions; his victory the most unexpected and unaccountable. He may steal into the heart like a thief or burst in like a robber. The zephyr is not so wooing, the hurricane not so furious. Samson and Hercules lose their strength in his presence and, shorn of their power, surrender at discretion. Mightier than Achilles, wilier than Ulysses, he leads them both captive, and, behind them in his train, the long line of captains whom Petrarch has catalogued as his helpless slaves. Why should it then be thought strange that a poor, weak, foolish, lonely young man should fall before him at his first onset! I confess, I thought it foolish, and yet so weak was I that I welcomed the arrow that pierced my heart, and as I sauntered homeward through the emptying streets, I hugged to my breast the joy that I loved once more.
As I was on the point of ringing the door-bell there was a heavy step behind me, and there was my old Drummer coming along. He turned in at the little gate. And I explained that I was his new lodger and had been to hear him play.
"Ah! You mean to hear the orchestra?"