eceive the
Stradivarius. Then, finally, and against the frantic negative pantomime
of his manager, a scherzo, played so lacily that it swept the house in
lightest laughter.

When Leon Kantor finally completed his program, they were loath to let
him go, crowding down the aisles upon him, applauding up, down, round
him, until the great disheveled house was like the roaring of a sea,
and he would laugh and throw out his arm in wide-spread helplessness,
and always his manager in the background, gesticulating against too much
of his precious product for the money, ushers already slamming up
chairs, his father's arms out for the Stradivarius, and, deepest in the
gloom of the wings, Sarah Kantor, in a rocker especially dragged out for
her, and from the depths of the black-silk reticule, darning his socks.

"_Bravo_--_bravo_! Give us the 'Humoresque'--Chopin
nocturne--polonaise--'Humoresque'! _Bravo_--_bravo_!"

And even as they stood, hatted and coated, importuning and pressing in
upon him, and with a wisp of a smile to the fourth left box, Leon Kantor
played them the "Humoresque" of Dvorak, skedaddling, plucking,
quirking--that laugh on life with a tear behind it. Then suddenly,
because he could escape no other way, rushed straight back for his
dressing-room, bursting in upon a flood of family already there before
him. Isadora Kantor, blue-shaven, aquiline, and already greying at the
temples; his five-year-old son, Leon; a soft little pouter-pigeon of a
wife, too, enormous of bust, in glittering ear-drops and a wrist-watch
of diamonds half buried in chubby wrist; Miss Esther Kantor, pink and
pretty; Rudolph; Boris, not yet done with growing-pains.

At the door, Miss Kantor met her brother, her eyes as sweetly moist as
her kiss.

"Leon, darling, you surpassed even yourself!"

"Quit crowding, children! Let him sit down. Here, Leon, let mamma give
you a fresh collar. Look how the child's perspired! Pull down that
window, Boris. Rudolph, don't let no one in. I give you my word if
to-night wasn't as near as I ever came to seeing a house go crazy. Not
even that time in Milan, darlink--when they broke down the doors, was it
like to-night--"

"Ought to seen, ma, the row of police outside--"

"Hush up, Roody! Don't you see your brother is trying to get his
breath?"

From Mrs. Isadore Kantor: "You ought to seen the balconies, mother.
Isadore and I went up just to see the jam."

"Six thousand dollars in the house to-night i