had no intention of harming it, nor of offending anybody. I am very sorry.”

[Pg 29]

“Well,” sighed the Master, “I should not have left it out. Strangers seldom come here, but I, too, was to blame. Fredrika takes it to herself; she thinks that she should have left her scrubbing and sat with you, but of that I am not so sure. It is mine Cremona,” he went on, bitterly, “nobody touches it but mineself.”

His distress was very real, and, for the first time, Irving felt a throb of sympathy. However unreasonable it might be, however weak and childish, he saw that he had unwittingly touched a tender place. All the love of the hale old heart was centred upon the violin, wooden, inanimate—but no. Nothing can be inanimate, which is sweetheart and child in one.

“Herr Kaufmann,” said Lynn, “believe me, [Pg 30]if any act of mine could wipe away my touch, I should do it here and now. As it is, I can only ask your pardon.”

[Pg 30]

“We will no longer speak of it,” returned the Master, with quiet dignity. “We will attempt to forget.”

He went to the window and stood with his back to Irving for a long time. “What could I have done?” thought Lynn. “I only picked it up and laid it down again—I surely did not harm it.”

He was too young to see that it was the significance, rather than the touch; that the old man felt as a lover might who saw his beloved in the arms of another. The bloom was gone from the fruit, the fragrance from the rose. For twenty-five years and more, the Cremona had been sacredly kept.

The Master’s thoughts had leaped that quarter-century at a single bound. Again he stood in the woods beyond East Lancaster, while the sky was dark with threatening clouds and the dead leaves scurried in fright before the north wind. Beside him stood a girl of twenty, her face white and her sweet mouth quivering.

“You must take it,” she was saying. “It [Pg 31]is mine to do with as I please, and no one will ever know. If anyone asks, I can fix it someway. It is part of myself that I give you, so that in all the years, you will not forget me. When you touch it, it will be as though you took my hand in yours. When it sings to you, it will be my voice saying: ‘I love you!’ And in it you will find all the sweetness of this one short year. All the pain will be blotted out and only the joy will be 

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