And from the dead face, from the dead white shoulders and the dead white arms, there exhaled and slowly crept a shudder, a desert wintriness and desolation, a slowly, slowly increasing chill in which my hands and lips grew numb. Had I quenched the sun? Had I stopped the heart of all life? Was it the coldness of death and space breaking in?

With a shudder I stared at the stony brow and the stark hair and the cool pale shimmer of the ear. The cold that streamed from them was deathly and yet it was beautiful, it rang, it vibrated. It was music!

Hadn’t I once felt this shudder before and found it at the same time a joy? Hadn’t I once caught this music before? Yes, with Mozart and the immortals.

Verses came into my head that I had once come upon somewhere:

We above you ever more residing In the ether’s star translumined ice Know nor day nor night nor time’s dividing, Wear nor age nor sex as our device. Cool and unchanging is our eternal being, Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.

Then the door of the box opened and in came Mozart. I did not recognise him at the first glance, for he was without pigtail, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, in modern dress. He took a seat close beside me, and I was on the point of holding him back because of the blood that had flowed over the floor from Hermine’s breast. He sat there and began busying himself with an apparatus and some instruments that stood beside him. He took it very seriously, tightening this and screwing that, and I looked with wonder at his adroit and nimble fingers and wished that I might see them playing a piano for once. I watched him thoughtfully, or in a reverie rather, lost in admiration of his beautiful and skilful hands, warmed too, by the sense of his presence and a little apprehensive as well. Of what he was actually doing and of what it was that he screwed and manipulated, I took no heed whatever.