he bow across the strings.

Back on the porch at that moment Mrs. Holly was saying:--

"Of course there's the orphan asylum, or maybe the poorhouse--if they'd
take him; but--Simeon," she broke off sharply, "where's that child
playing now?"

Simeon listened with intent ears.

"In the barn, I should say."

"But he'd gone to bed!"

"And he'll go to bed again," asserted Simeon Holly grimly, as he rose
to his feet and stalked across the moonlit yard to the barn.

As before, Mrs. Holly followed him, and as before, both involuntarily
paused just inside the barn door to listen. No runs and trills and
rollicking bits of melody floated down the stairway to-night. The notes
were long-drawn, and plaintively sweet; and they rose and swelled and
died almost into silence while the man and the woman by the door stood
listening.

They were back in the long ago--Simeon Holly and his wife--back with a
boy of their own who had made those same rafters ring with shouts of
laughter, and who, also, had played the violin--though not like this;
and the same thought had come to each: "What if, after all, it were
John playing all alone in the moonlight!"

It had not been the violin, in the end, that had driven John Holly from
home. It had been the possibilities in a piece of crayon. All through
childhood the boy had drawn his beloved "pictures" on every inviting
space that offered,--whether it were the "best-room" wall-paper, or the
fly leaf of the big plush album,--and at eighteen he had announced his
determination to be an artist. For a year after that Simeon Holly
fought with all the strength of a stubborn will, banished chalk and
crayon from the house, and set the boy to homely tasks that left no
time for anything but food and sleep--then John ran away.

That was fifteen years ago, and they had not seen him since; though two
unanswered letters in Simeon Holly's desk testified that perhaps this,
at least, was not the boy's fault.

It was not of the grown-up John, the willful boy and runaway son,
however, that Simeon Holly and his wife were thinking, as they stood
just inside the barn door; it was of Baby John, the little curly-headed
fellow that had played at their knees, frolicked in this very barn, and
nestled in their arms when the day was done.

Mrs. Holly spoke first--and it was not as she had spoken on the porch.

"Simeon," she began tremulously, "that dear child must go to bed!" And
she hurried across the floor and up the