To MR. BROOK, the head of the music department at Ryder College, was due all the credit fetting Madame Zilensky on the faculty. The college sidered itself fortunate; her reputation was impressive, both as a poser and as a pedagogue. Mr. Brook took on himself the responsibility of finding a house for Madame Zilensky, a fortable place with a garden, which was veo the college ao the apartment house where he himself lived.
No one ibridge had known Madame Zilensky before she came. Mr. Brook had seen her pictures in musical journals, and once he had written to her about the authenticity of a certain Buxtehude manuscript. Also, when it was beiled that she was to join the faculty, they had exged a few cables aers on practical affairs. She wrote in a clear, square hand, and the only thing out of the ordinary in these letters was the fact that they tained an occasional refereo objects and persons altogether unknown to Mr. Brook, such as "the yellow cat in Lisbon" or "poor Heinrich." These lapses Mr. Brook put down to the fusion of getting herself and her family out of Europe.
Mr. Brook was a someastel person; years of Mozart mis, of explanations about diminished sevenths and minor triads, had given him a watchful vocational patience. For the most part, he kept to himself. He loathed academic fiddle-faddle and ittees. Years before, when the music department had decided to gang together and spend the summer in Salzburg, Mr. Brook sneaked out of the arra at the last moment and took a solitary trip to Peru. He had a few etricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous. Often, when fronted with some grave and ingruous situation, he would feel a little iickle, which stiffened his long, mild fad sharpehe light in his gray eyes.
Mr. Brook met Madame Zilensky at the Westbridge station a week before the beginning of the fall semester. He reized her instantly. She was a tall, straight woman with a pale and haggard face. Her eyes were deeply shadowed and she wore her dark, ragged hair pushed back from her forehead. She had large, delicate hands, which were very grubby. About her person as a whole there was something noble and abstract that made Mr. Brook draw back for a moment and stand nervously undoing his cuff links. In spite of her clothes -- a long, black skirt and a broken-down old leather jacket -- she made an impression of vague elegance. With Madame Zilensky were three children, boys between the ages of ten and six, all blond, blank-eyed, aiful. There was oher person, an old woman who turned out later to be the Finnish servant.
This was the group he found at the station. The only luggage they had with them was two immense boxes of manuscripts, the rest of their paraphernalia having been fotten iation at Springfield when they ged trains. That is the sort of thing that happen to anyone. When Mr. Brook got them all into a taxi, he thought the worst difficulties were over, but Madame Zilensky suddenly tried to scramble over his knees a out of the door.
"My God!" she said. "I left my -- how do you say? -- my tick-tick-tick --"
"Your watch?" asked Mr. Brook.
"Oh no!" she said vehemently. "You know, my tick-tick-tick," and she waved her forefinger from side to side, pendulum fashion.
"Tick-tick," said Mr. Brook, putting his hands to his forehead and closing his eyes. "Could you possibly mean a metronome?"
"Yes! Yes! I think I must have lo