a--Gina Berg, that is a beautiful name to make famous."

"You see how it is done? Gins--Berg. Gina Berg.

"Clev-er!"

They stood then smiling across a chasm of the diffidence of youth, she
fumbling at the great fur pelt out of which her face flowered so dewily.

"I--well--we--we are in the fourth box--I guess we had better be
going--fourth box left." He wanted to find words, but for consciousness
of self could not "It's a wonderful house out there waiting for you,
Leon Kantor, and you--you're wonderful, too!"

"The--flowers--thanks!"

"My father, he sent them. Come, father--quick!"

Suddenly there was a tight tensity that seemed to crowd up the little
room.

"Abrahm--quick--get Hancock--that first rows of chairs has got to be
moved--there he is, in the wings--see the piano ain't dragged down too
far! Leon, got your mute on your pocket? Please Mr. Ginsberg--you must
excuse--Here, Leon, is your glass of water. Drink it, I say. Shut that
door out there, boy, so there ain't a draft in the wings. Here, Leon,
your violin. Got neckerchief? Listen how they're shouting--it's for
you--Leon--darlink--go!"

In the center of that vast human bowl which had finally shouted itself
out, slim, boylike, and in his supreme isolation, Leon Kantor drew bow
and a first thin, pellucid, and perfect note into a silence breathless
to receive it.

Throughout the arduous flexuosities of the Mendelssohn E-minor concerto,
singing, winding from tonal to tonal climax, and out of the slow
movement, which is like a tourniquet twisting the heart into the
spirited _allegro molto vivace_, it was as if beneath Leon Kantor's
fingers the strings were living vein-cords, youth, vitality, and the
very foam of exuberance racing through them.

That was the power of him--the Vichy and the sparkle of youth, so that,
playing, the melody poured round him like wine and went down seething
and singing into the hearts of his hearers.

Later, and because these were his people and because they were dark and
Slavic with his Slavic darkness, he played, as if his very blood were
weeping, the "Kol Nidre," which is the prayer of his race for atonement.

And then the super-amphitheater, filled with those whose emotions lie
next to the surface and whose pores have not been closed over with a
water-tight veneer, burst into its cheers and its tears.

There were fifteen recalls from the wings, Abrahm Kantor standing
counting them off on his fingers, and trembling to r