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As he listened to Raoul, he seemed to emerge from
the conflicting emotions which had been whirling him about and
sucking him under. He felt as if a clear light broke upon his
mind, and with it a conviction that good was, after all, stronger
than evil, and that good was possible to men. He seemed to discover
that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever
without faltering and without sin. He looked across the heads of
the people at Frank Shabata with calmness. That rapture was for those
who could feel it; for people who could not, it was non-existent.
He coveted nothing that was Frank Shabata's. The spirit he had
met in music was his own. Frank Shabata had never found it; would
never find it if he lived beside it a thousand years; would have
destroyed it if he had found it, as Herod slew the innocents, as
Rome slew the martyrs.
SAN--CTA MARI-I-I-A,
wailed Raoul from the organ loft;
O--RA PRO NO-O-BIS!
And it did not occur to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus
before, that music had ever before given a man this equivocal
revelation.


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