raiment, monsieur!"

"Ah! Vraiment! Voyons! Donnez--un instant--vous verrez."

The fiddler, doubting but hypnotized, handed him the fiddle; his dark
face changed when he saw this stranger fling it up to his shoulder and
the ways of his fingers with bow and strings. Fiorsen had begun to walk
up the street, his eyes searching for the flower-boxes. He saw them,
stopped, and began playing "Che faro?" He played it wonderfully on
that poor fiddle; and the fiddler, who had followed at his elbow, stood
watching him, uneasy, envious, but a little entranced. Sapristi! This
tall, pale monsieur with the strange face and the eyes that looked drunk
and the hollow chest, played like an angel! Ah, but it was not so easy
as all that to make money in the streets of this sacred town! You might
play like forty angels and not a copper! He had begun another tune--like
little pluckings at your heart--tres joli--tout a fait ecoeurant!
Ah, there it was--a monsieur as usual closing the window, drawing the
curtains! Always same thing! The violin and the bow were thrust back
into his hands; and the tall strange monsieur was off as if devils were
after him--not badly drunk, that one! And not a sou thrown down! With
an uneasy feeling that he had been involved in something that he did
not understand, the lame, dark fiddler limped his way round the nearest
corner, and for two streets at least did not stop. Then, counting the
silver Fiorsen had put into his hand and carefully examining his fiddle,
he used the word, "Bigre!" and started for home.

XIX

Gyp hardly slept at all. Three times she got up, and, stealing to the
door, looked in at her sleeping baby, whose face in its new bed she
could just see by the night-light's glow. The afternoon had shaken her
nerves. Nor was Betty's method of breathing while asleep conducive to
the slumber of anything but babies. It was so hot, too, and the sound of
the violin still in her ears. By that little air of Poise, she had
known for certain it was Fiorsen; and her father's abrupt drawing of the
curtains had clinched that certainty. If she had gone to the window and
seen him, she would not have been half so deeply disturbed as she was by
that echo of an old emotion. The link which yesterday she thought broken
for good was reforged in some mysterious way. The sobbing of that old
fiddle had been his way of saying, "Forgive me; forgive!" To leave him
would have been so much easier if she had really hated him