rilled his own soul.

Immediately all thought of himself or of his surroundings was lost. With
eyes half closed and dreamy he began to play, without effort, almost
mechanically, but with the deft touch of a master hand, while liquid
harmonies filled the room, quivering, rising, falling; at times low,
plaintive, despairing; then swelling exultantly, only to die away in
tremulous, minor undertones. The man's pent-up feelings had at last
found expression,--his alternate hope and despair, his unutterable
loneliness and longing,--all voiced by the violin.

Of the lapse of time Darrell had neither thought nor consciousness until
the door opened and Mrs. Dean's calm smile and matter-of-fact voice
recalled him to a material world.

"I see that you have found Harry's violin," she said.

"I beg your pardon," Darrell stammered, somewhat dazed by his sudden
descent to the commonplace, "I ought not to have taken it; I never
thought,--I was so delighted to find the instrument and so carried away
with its tones,--it never occurred to me how it might seem to you!"

"Oh, that is all right," she interposed, quietly; "use it whenever you
like. Harry bought it two years ago, but he never had the patience to
learn it, so it has been used very little. I never heard such playing as
yours, and I stepped in to ask you to bring it downstairs and play for
us to-night. Mr. Britton will be delighted; he enjoys everything of that
sort."

Around the fireside that evening Darrell had an attentive audience,
though the appreciation of his auditors was manifested in a manner
characteristic of each. Mr. Underwood, after two or three futile
attempts to talk business with his partner, finding him very
uncommunicative, gave himself up to the enjoyment of his pipe and the
music in about equal proportions, indulging surreptitiously in
occasional brief naps, though always wide awake at the end of each
number and joining heartily in the applause.

Mrs. Dean sat gazing into the glowing embers, her face lighted with
quiet pleasure, but her knitting-needles twinkled and flashed in the
firelight with the same unceasing regularity, and she doubled and seamed
and "slipped and bound" her stitches with the same monotonous precision
as on other evenings.

Mr. Britton, in a comfortable reclining-chair, sat silent, motionless,
his head thrown back, his eyes nearly closed, but in the varying
expression of his mobile face Darrell found both inspiration and
compensa