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gray-haired, weak-jawed, beardless face in the light of the two candles on the piano, letting his hands dangle at his sides.
    â€œI won’t ask you again,” he said at last, softly. “If you’re afraid of damaging your health, madam, then let the beauty that might have sounded under your fingers remain dead and mute. You weren’t always so reasonable, at least not conversely when it came to renouncing beauty. You didn’t worry about your health and showed much more daring and determination about following your will, when you forsook your childhood fountain and laid aside the little golden crown. . . . Hear me out,” he said after a short pause, lowering his voice even further. “If you sit down here and play as you did before, when your father stood beside you drawing those notes from his violin which always made you cry, then maybe it will appear once more, secretly sparkling on your head, the little, golden crown . . .”
    â€œReally?” she asked with a smile . . . By chance, her voice failed her when she said this word, so that the first half came out hoarse and the second was utterly toneless. She cleared her throat and then said:
    â€œAre those truly Chopin’s nocturnes you have there?”
    â€œThey truly are. They’re open and everything is ready.”
    â€œWell, then, by God, I will play one of them,” she said. “But only one, you hear? You’ll have heard enough of me then forever, anyway.”
    With that, she got up, laid her needlepoint down at her side and walked over to the piano. She took a seat on the stool, which had a couple of bound volumes of music on top, adjusted the candelabras and flipped through the sheet music. Mr. Spinell had pulled up a chair and sat there next to her like a music teacher.
    She played the Nocturne in E-flat Major, op. 9, no. 2. If it was true that she had forgotten some of what she once knew, her performing skills back then must have been truly first-class. It was only a mediocre piano, but after the first few chords she knew how to handle it with control and taste. She displayed a tensely attuned sensitivity to timbre and a joyful command of rhythm that bordered on the fantastic. Her touch was both sure and delicate. Under her hands, the melody yielded every last bit of sweetness, and her embellishments nestled around its main lines with restrained grace.
    She wore the same dress as on the day of her arrival: the dark, heavy bodice with the thick-cut velvet arabesques that made her head and hands look so unearthly and delicate. Her facial expression remained unchanged while she played, but her lips seemed to become more clearly defined, and the shadows in the corners of her eyes seemed to deepen. After she had finished, she put her hands in her lap and continued to gaze at the music. Mr. Spinell sat silent and still.
    She played another nocturne, then a second and a third. Then she stood up, but only in order to look for more music on the top of the piano.
    Mr. Spinell had the idea of investigating the volumes in black cardboard on the piano stool. Suddenly he made an incomprehensible sound, and his immense white hands fumbled excitedly with one of those discarded books.
    â€œImpossible! . . . It can’t be,” he said . . . “Do my eyesdeceive me? No! . . . Do you know what this is? . . . What was lying here? . . .What I’m holding here?”
    â€œWhat is it?” she asked.
    Without a word he showed her the title page. Quite pale, he lowered the book and stared at her with trembling lips.
    â€œReally? How did that get there? Let me see it,” she said simply. She propped it up on the stand, sat down and after a moment’s silence began with the first page.
    He was sitting at her side, leaning forward, his hands folded between his knees, his head down. She played the beginning at an extravagantly, torturously slow