Will that do?"
Falbe laughed.
"Very well indeed," he said. "Now for 'Good King Wenceslas.' Wasn't
it--"
"Yes; I got awfully interested over it, Hermann. I thought I would try
and work it up into a few variations."
"Let's hear," said Falbe.
This was a vastly different affair. Michael had shown both ingenuity and
a great sense of harmonic beauty in the arrangement of the very simple
little tune that Falbe had made him exercise his ear over, and the
half-dozen variations that followed showed a wonderfully mature
handling. The air which he dealt with haunted them as a sort of unseen
presence. It moved in a tiny gavotte, or looked on at a minuet measure;
it wailed, yet without being positively heard, in a little dirge of
itself; it broadened into a march, it shouted in a bravura of rapid
octaves, and finally asserted itself, heard once more, over a great
scale base of bells.
Falbe, as was his habit when interested, sat absolutely still, but
receptive and alert, instead of jerking and fidgeting as he had done
over Michael's fiasco in the Chopin prelude, and at the end he jumped up
with a certain excitement.
"Do you know what you've done?" he said. "You've done something that's
really good.
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