The music drifted from wistful into a darker melancholy. "You think I helped her," he said, his voice almost too soft to hear. "You think she went back to her husband all ready to work out their problems and start over again."

He shook his head. "No. She's all fired up now, but it won't last. Chances are she'll be right back here Monday night."

"You're not responsible for solving all the problems of the world," I reminded him quietly. "Besides, who's to say when a temporary fix will grow into something more permanent? You never know about these things."

"Sure," he said, in a tone that said he didn't believe it for a minute. "I know."

I looked down into my glass, tipping it and watching the remnants of the foam slide up and down the sides. So that was it, or at least part of it. Somewhere along the line, one of his musical helping hands had gone awry. Had made matters worse, probably, though I could only guess how that might have happened.

And for whatever reason, he'd taken that failure personally. It hadn't stopped him from playing individual songs for individual people, but it _had_ scared him away from any attempt to market his work to the masses. Probably also why he kept moving from area to area, bar to bar. If and when the brunette came back with even deeper troubles, he didn't want to be there to see it. Or maybe he just didn't want to be there to offer her more false hope.

Weldon Sommers, in other words, was well on his way to turning himself into a modern version of one of the classical Greek tragic figures he undoubtedly read all about in those lonely off-hours of his.

But at the moment, that didn't matter. All that mattered was the timing of the two events. And I could only hope that this mysterious failure had happened just before he'd withdrawn his music from that fifth publisher. Reading his history, Weldon had struck me as the impulsive type who generally let stimulus flow into response with very