te
parish had known it tenderly. Before she could talk she had
danced--courtesied and turned, tiptoed and fallen and risen again,
latter end first, to the gay strains he had loved to wring from it.
Before it seemed safe, for the instrument, to trust it in her hands,
she had learned to draw its bow; and for years, now, there had been no
resident within the parish who could not have been her scholar better
than to be her teacher.

When Claude came, she had shut the violin in its case, and left the
poor thing hidden away, despising its powers to charm, lost in
self-contempt, and helpless under the spell of a chaste passion's
first enchantment. When he went, she still forgot the instrument for
many days. She returned with more than dutiful energy to her full part
in the household cares, and gave every waking hour not so filled to
fierce study. If she could not follow him--if a true maiden must wait
upon faith--at least she would be ready if fate should ever bring him
back.

But one night, when she had conned her simple books until the words
ran all together on the page, some good angel whispered, "The
violin!" She took it and played. The music was but a song, but from
some master of song. She played it, it may be, not after the best
rules, yet as one may play who, after life's first great billow has
gone over him, smites again his forgotten instrument. With tears, of
all emotions mingled, starting from her eyes, and the bow trembling on
the strings, she told the violin her love. And it answered her:

"Be strong! be strong! you shall not love for naught. He shall--he
shall come back--he shall come back and lead us into joy." From that
time the violin had more employment than ever before in all its days.

So it and Marguerite were gone away to the great strange city
together. The loneliness they left behind was a sad burden to
Zosephine. No other one thing had had so much influence to make so
nearly vulnerable the defences of her heart when Mr. Tarbox essayed to
storm them. On the night following that event, the same that he had
spent so sleeplessly in St. Martinville, she wrote a letter to
Marguerite, which, though intended to have just the opposite effect,
made the daughter feel that this being in New Orleans, and all the
matter connected with it, were one unmixed mass of utter selfishness.
The very written words that charged her to stay on seemed to say,
"Come home!" Her strong little mother! always quiet and grave, i