ir former intimacy, yet the two young men
saw less and less of one another, until their intercourse was confined
to an accidental greeting in the street. I believe that during all this
time my brother played very frequently on the Stradivarius violin,
but always alone. Its very possession seemed to have engendered from
the first in his mind a secretive tendency which, as I have already
observed, was entirely alien to his real disposition. As he had
concealed its discovery from his sister, so he had also from his friend,
and Mr. Gaskell remained in complete ignorance of the existence of such
an instrument.

On the evening of its arrival from London, John seems to have carefully
unpacked the violin and tried it with a new bow of Tourte's make which
he had purchased of Mr. Smart. He had shut the heavy outside door of his
room before beginning to play, so that no one might enter unawares; and
he told me afterwards that though he had naturally expected from the
instrument a very fine tone, yet its actual merits so far exceeded his
anticipations as entirely to overwhelm him. The sound issued from it
in a volume of such depth and purity as to give an impression of the
passages being chorded, or even of another violin being played at the
same time. He had had, of course, no opportunity of practising during
his illness, and so expected to find his skill with the bow somewhat
diminished; but he perceived, on the contrary, that his performance was
greatly improved, and that he was playing with a mastery and feeling
of which he had never before been conscious. While attributing this
improvement very largely to the beauty of the instrument on which he was
performing, yet he could not but believe that by his illness, or in some
other unexplained way, he had actually acquired a greater freedom of
wrist and fluency of expression, with which reflection he was not a
little elated. He had had a lock fixed on the cupboard in which he had
originally found the violin, and here he carefully deposited it on each
occasion after playing, before he opened the outer door of his room.

So the summer term passed away. The examinations had come in their due
time, and were now over. Both the young men had submitted themselves
to the ordeal, and while neither would of course have admitted as
much to anyone else, both felt secretly that they had no reason to be
dissatisfied with their performance. The results would not be published
for some weeks to co