er the pity in the other's voice. "Play. Won't you?"

"But how are you EVER going to know what a beautiful world it is?"
shuddered David. "How can you know? And how can you ever play in tune?
You're one of the instruments. Father said everybody was. And he said
everybody was playing SOMETHING all the time; and if you didn't play in
tune--"

"Joe, Joe, please," begged the little girl "Won't you let him go? I'm
afraid. I told you--"

"Shucks, Betty! He won't hurt ye," laughed Joe, a little irritably.
Then to David he turned again with some sharpness.

"Play, won't ye? You SAID you'd play!"

"Yes, oh, yes, I'll play," faltered David, bringing his violin hastily
to position, and testing the strings with fingers that shook a little.

"There!" breathed Joe, settling back in his chair with a contented
sigh. "Now, play it again--what you did before."

But David did not play what he did before--at first. There were no airy
cloud-boats, no far-reaching sky, no birds, or murmuring forest brooks
in his music this time. There were only the poverty-stricken room, the
dirty street, the boy alone at the window, with his sightless eyes--the
boy who never, never would know what a beautiful world he lived in.

Then suddenly to David came a new thought. This boy, Joe, had said
before that he understood. He had seemed to know that he was being told
of the sunny skies and the forest winds, the singing birds and the
babbling brooks. Perhaps again now he would understand.

What if, for those sightless eyes, one could create a world?

Possibly never before had David played as he played then. It was as if
upon those four quivering strings, he was laying the purple and gold of
a thousand sunsets, the rose and amber of a thousand sunrises, the
green of a boundless earth, the blue of a sky that reached to heaven
itself--to make Joe understand.

"Gee!" breathed Joe, when the music came to an end with a crashing
chord. "Say, wa'n't that just great? Won't you let me, please, just
touch that fiddle?" And David, looking into the blind boy's exalted
face, knew that Joe had indeed--understood.

CHAPTER X

THE LADY OF THE ROSES

It was a new world, indeed, that David created for Joe after that--a
world that had to do with entrancing music where once was silence;
delightful companionship where once was loneliness; and toothsome
cookies and doughnuts where once was hunger.

The Widow Glaspell, Joe's mother, worked out by the day, scrubb