"Life is short, and I prefer to enjoy it." "Say," interrupted Mrs.Challoner, turning to me at this juncture, "now you are feeling so well, would it be asking you too much to play us a piece of your own improvising ?" I glanced at the grand piano, which occupied a corner of the salon where we sat, and hesitated.

But at a slight nod from Zara, I rose, drew off my gloves, and seated myself at the instrument.

Passing my hands lightly over the keys, I wandered through a few running passages; and as I did so, murmured a brief petition to my aerial friend Aeon.
Scarcely had I done this, when a flood of music seemed to rush to my brain and thence to my fingers, and I played, hardly knowing what I played, but merely absorbed in trying to give utterance to the sounds which were falling softly upon my inner sense of hearing like drops of summer rain on a thirsty soil.

I was just aware that I was threading the labyrinth of a minor key, and that the result was a network of delicate and tender melody reminding me of Heinrich Heine's words: "Lady, did you not hear the nightingale sing?
A beautiful silken voice--a web of happy notes--and my soul was taken in its meshes, and strangled and tortured thereby." A few minutes, and the inner voice that conversed with me so sweetly, died away into silence, and at the same time my fingers found their way to the closing chord.

As one awaking from a dream, I looked up.