class="pnext">She came up to the bedside and was quick to notice by my nervous movements that I was suffering. Sitting down she began to tell gaily of her walk over the hill, and, as she spoke, my aching was calmed as if she had laid a finger on the electric switch that controlled it. Then she suggested reading to me, and took up the volume of poems we had discussed.

Her voice was not quite intense enough for strong emotion; it had not the momentum, so to speak, to carry the lines along with the swing and rhythm necessary. It was too light for that, but it more than made up for it by its sympathetic tenderness and the delicacy of its inflection. Her tones lulled me, and I fell asleep.

In the afternoon she brought her mending, and we talked for a couple of hours or so, always keeping, as she expressed it, "on the island." What personalities we discussed, that is, had no reference to her history or her plans. She warned me off very cleverly several times when the talk approached her circumstances or even her moods and tastes.

When she confessed that she played a little on the piano and violin, I positively insisted upon my rights as an invalid to be amused. She rolled up her work and went to get her violin without excuses or apologies.

I waited with considerable anxiety to hear what and how she would play, not committing myself as to my own choice of composers. She began in her own room, and through the opened doors I heard the strains of the Prize Song played with great verve and sentiment. I was delighted. She came, still playing, into my chamber, her sleeves rolled up (she said she could not play else), and accepted my compliments graciously and simply. Then, walking up and down, absorbed, she gave me fragments of Cesar Franck's sonata for the violin and piano. To watch her, supple, virile, rapt, to note her clever, accomplished technique, her passionate, free-armed command of the bow—I have seldom seen such a splendid attack or so sure and true a vibrato—was a joy beautifully associated with the clarity and subtle craftsmanship of the master.

So she ran on, alternating her renditions with scraps of talk that showed a keen musical sense and an appreciation of the radical, ultra-modern movement of the time. Next she burst into a vibrant, dramatic Polish folksong that excited me like a fire. And finally, as a tour de force, her eyes dancing as she watched me over her shoulder with some new audacious devil in her smile, she enchanted me with a vivid piece most astonishingly enlivened with flights of technique—trills, brilliant chord passages, and runs with the upward and downward "staccato bow." Then she threw down her fiddle and came up to me, laughing.

That evening she had another delight for me, coming to my bedside and reading Villon and Verlaine in the original, translating the old French for me when I was perplexed by the argot. And for the picture, I need only add that Leah was of the circle, and made her own comments!