rest put on their wraps. Then Professor Marshall stood at the door holding up a lamp while the company trooped down the long front walk to the gate in the hedge, and turned along the country road to the cross-roads where the big Interurban cars whizzed by.

All this happened with that unbroken continuity which was the characteristic of the Marshall life, most marking them as different from the other faculty families. Week after week, and month after month, this program was followed with little variation, except for the music which was played, and the slight picturesque uncertainty as to whether old Reinhardt would or would not arrive mildly under the influence of long Sunday imbibings. Not that this factor interfered at all with the music. One of Sylvia's most vivid childhood recollections was the dramatic contrast between old Reinhardt with, and without, his violin. Partly from age, and partly from a too convivial life, the old, heavily veined hands trembled so that he could scarcely unbutton his overcoat, or handle his cup of hot coffee. His head shook too, and his kind, rheumy eyes, in their endeavor to focus themselves, seemed to flicker back and forth in their sockets. The child used to watch him, fascinated, as he fumbled endlessly at the fastenings of his violin-case, and put back the top with uncertain fingers. She was waiting for the thrilling moment when he should tuck the instrument away under his pendulous double chin and draw his bow across the strings in the long sonorous singing chord, which ran up and down Sylvia's back like forked lightning.

This was while all the others were tuning and scraping and tugging at their pegs, a pleasant bustle of discord which became so much a part of Sylvia's brain that she could never in after years hear the strumming and sawing of an orchestra preparing to play, without seeing the big living-room of her father's house, with its low whitewashed ceiling, its bare, dully shining floor, its walls lined with books, its shabby, comfortable furniture, the whole quickened by the Promethean glow from the blaze in the grate and glorified by the chastened passion of the singing strings.

The two Anglo-Saxon, professors were but able amateurs of their instruments. Bauermeister, huge, red, and impassive, was by virtue of his blood, a lifelong training, and a musical ancestry, considerably more than an amateur; and old Reinhardt was the master of them all. His was a history which would have been tragic if it had happened to any but Reinhardt, who cared for nothing but an easy life, beer, and the divine tones which he alone could draw from his violin. He had offered, fifty years ago in Vienna, the most brilliant promise of a most brilliant career, a promise which had come to naught because of his monstrous lack of ambition, and his endless yielding to circumstance, which had finally, by a series of inconceivable migrations, landed him in the German colony of La Chance, impecunious and obscure and invincibly convinced that he had everything worth having in life. "Of vat use?" he would say, even now, when asked to play in public—"de moosic ist all—and dat is eben so goodt here mit friends." Or, "Dere goes a thousand peoples to a goncert—maybe fife from dat thousand lofes de moosic—let dose fife gome to me—and I play dem all day for noding!" or again, more iconoclastically still,—when told of golden harvests to be reaped, "And for vat den? I can't play on more dan von fioleen at a time—is it? I got a good one now. And if I drink more beer dan now, I might make myself seeck!" This with a prodigiously sly wink of one heavy eyelid.

He gave enough music lessons to pay his small expenses, although after one or two stormy passages in which he treated with outrageous and unjustifiable violence the dawdling pupils coming from well-to-do families, he made it a rule to take no pupils whose parents employed a servant, and confined himself to children of the poorer classes, among whom he kept up a small orchestra which played together twice a week and never gave any concerts. And almost since the arrival of the Marshalls in La Chance and his unceremonious entrance into the house as, walking across the fields on a Sunday afternoon, he had heard Professor Marshall playing the Doric Toccata on the newly installed piano, he had spent his every Sunday evening in their big living-room.

He had seen the children appear and grow older, and adored them with Teutonic sentimentality, especially Sylvia, whom he called his "Moonbeam brincess," his "little ellfen fairy," and whom, when she was still tiny, he used to take up on his greasy old knees and, resting his violin on her head, play his wildest fantasies, that she might feel how it "talked to her bones."

In early childhood Sylvia was so used to him that, like the others of her circle, she accepted, indeed hardly noticed, his somewhat startling eccentricities, his dirty linen, his face and hands to match, his shapeless garments hanging loosely over the flabby corpulence of his uncomely old body, his beery breath. To her, old Reinhardt was but the queer external symbol of a never-failing enchantment. Through the pleasant harmonious give-and-take of the other instruments, the voice of his violin vibrated with the throbbing passion of a living thing. His dirty old hand might shake and quaver, but once the neck of the fiddle rested between thumb and forefinger, the seraph who made his odd abiding-place in old Reinhardt's soul sang out in swelling tones and spoke of heavenly things, and of the Paradise where we might live, if we were but willing.

Even when they were quite little children, Sylvia and Judith, and later, Lawrence, were allowed to sit up on Sunday evenings to listen to the music. Judith nearly always slept, steadily; and not infrequently after a long day of outdoor fun, stupefied with fresh air and exercise, Lawrence, and Sylvia too, could not keep their eyes open, and dozed and woke and dozed again, coiled like so many little kittens among the cushions of the big divan. In all the intensely enjoyed personal pleasures of her later youth, and these were many for Sylvia, she was never to know a more utter sweetness than thus to fall asleep, the music a far-off murmur in her ears, and to wake again to the restrained, clarified ecstasy of the four concerted voices.

And yet it was in connection with this very quartet that she had her first shocked vision of how her home-life appeared to other people. She once chanced, when she was about eight years old, to go with her father on a Saturday to his office at the University, where he had forgotten some papers necessary for his seminar. There, sitting on the front steps of the Main Building, waiting for her father, she had encountered the wife of the professor of European History with her beautiful young-lady sister from New York and her two daughters, exquisite little girls in white serge, whose tailored, immaculate perfection made Sylvia's heart heavy with a sense of the plebeian inelegance of her own Saturday-morning play-clothes. Mrs. Hubert, obeying an impulse of curiosity, stopped to speak to the little Marshall girl, about whose queer upbringing there were so many stories current, and was struck with the decorative possibilities of the pretty child, apparent to her practised eye. As she made the kindly intended, vague remarks customarily served out to unknown children, she was thinking: "How can any woman with a vestige of a woman's instinct dress that lovely child in ready-made, commonplace, dark-colored clothes? She would repay any amount of care and "thought." So you take music-lessons too, besides your school?" she asked mechanically. She explained to her sister, a stranger in La Chance: "Music is one of the things I starve for, out here! We never hear it unless we go clear to Chicago—and such prices! Here, there is simply no musical feeling!" She glanced again at Sylvia, who was now answering her questions, fluttered