At least she thought she knew. Hadn’t she read over and over, when seated in the garret, the story of the old and new kings, how they sat on their thrones, and ruled their people sometimes with a rod of iron? Jinnie brought to mind some of the vivid pictures, and shyly lifted a pair of violet eyes to scan the face above her. Surely this King was handsomer than any in the book. She tried to imagine him on his throne, and wondered if he were always smiling as now.

“You’re quite different from your relations,” she observed presently.

Theodore King laughed aloud. The sound startled the girl into a straighter posture. It rang out so merrily that she laughed too after making up her mind that he was not ridiculing her.

“Really you are!” she exclaimed. “I mean it. You know the picture of the King with a red suit on,—he doesn’t look like you. His nose went sort of down over his mouth—I mean, well, yours don’t.”

She stumbled through the last few words, intuitively realizing that she had been too personal.

“You like to read, I gather,” stated Mr. King.

“Yes, but I like to fiddle better,” said Jinnie.

“Oh, you play, do you?”

Jinnie’s eyes fell upon the instrument standing in the corner of the opposite seat, wrapped in an old jacket. She nodded.

“I play some. I love my fiddle almost as much as I do Milly Ann and her kitties.”

“Won’t you play for me?” asked Mr. King, gravely putting forth his hand.

Jinnie paused a moment. Then without further hesitancy she took up the violin and unfastened it. 47

47

“I’ll be glad to fiddle for a king,” she said naïvely.

She did not speak as she turned and twisted the small white keys.

Outside the storm was still roaring over the hills, sweeping the lake into monstrous waves. The shriek of the wind mingled with the snap of the taut strings under the agile fingers of the hill girl. Then Jinnie began to play. Never in all his life had Theodore King seen a picture such as the girl before him made. The wondrous beauty of her, the marvelous fingers traveling over the strings, together with the moaning of the night 

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