a
certain cheapness. Music as an end of existence and means of
livelihood was lightly estimated by the followers of the learned
professions, the wielders of weighty doctrines and drugs, and also by
the tillers of the stern New England soil. The Hautvilles, furnishing
the music in church, and for dances and funerals, were regarded much
in the light of mountebanks, and jugglers with sweet sounds. People
wondered that Lot and Burr Gordon should go to their house so much.
Not a week all winter but Burr had been there once or twice, and Lot
had been there nearly every night when his cousin was not. And he
stayed late also--this night he outstayed Burr at Dorothy Fair's. The
music was kept up until a late hour, for Madelon proposed tune after
tune with nervous ardor when her father and brothers seemed to flag.
Nobody paid much attention to Lot; he was too constant a visitor. He
settled into a favorite chair of his near the fire, and listened with
the firelight playing over his delicate, peaked face. Now and then he
coughed.

Old David Hautville, the father, stood out in front of the hearth by
his great bass-viol, leaning fondly over it like a lover over his
mistress. David Hautville was a great, spare man--a body of muscles
and sinews under dry, brown flesh, like an old oak-tree. His long,
white mustache curved towards his ears with sharp sweeps, like doves'
wings. His thick, white brows met over his keen, black eyes. He kept
time with his head, jerking it impatiently now and then, when some
one lagged or sped ahead in the musical race.

Three of the Hautville sons were men grown. One, Louis, laid his
dark, smooth cheek caressingly against the violin which he played.
Eugene sang the sonorous tenor, and Abner the bass, like an organ.
The youngest son, Richard, small and slender as a girl, so like
Madelon that he might have been taken for her had he been dressed in
feminine gear, lifted his eager face at her side and raised his
piercing, sweet treble, which seemed to pass beyond hearing into
fancy. Madelon, her brown throat swelling above her lace tucker, like
a bird's, stood in the midst of the men, and sang and sang, and her
wonderful soprano flowed through the harmony like a river of honey;
and yet now and then it came with a sudden fierce impetus, as if she
would force some enemy to bay with music. Madelon was slender, but
full of curves which were like the soft breast of a bird before an
enemy. Sometimes as she sang she