at your heart--tres joli--tout a fait ecoeurant! Ah,
there it was--a monsieur as usual closing the window, drawing the
curtains! Always same thing! The violin and the bow were thrust back
into his hands; and the tall strange monsieur was off as if devils were
after him--not badly drunk, that one! And not a sou thrown down! With
an uneasy feeling that he had been involved in something that he did not
understand, the lame, dark fiddler limped his way round the nearest
corner, and for two streets at least did not stop. Then, counting the
silver Fiorsen had put into his hand and carefully examining his fiddle,
he used the word, "Bigre!" and started for home.

XIX

Gyp hardly slept at all. Three times she got up, and, stealing to the
door, looked in at her sleeping baby, whose face in its new bed she could
just see by the night-light's glow. The afternoon had shaken her nerves.
Nor was Betty's method of breathing while asleep conducive to the slumber
of anything but babies. It was so hot, too, and the sound of the violin
still in her ears. By that little air of Poise, she had known for
certain it was Fiorsen; and her father's abrupt drawing of the curtains
had clinched that certainty. If she had gone to the window and seen him,
she would not have been half so deeply disturbed as she was by that echo
of an old emotion. The link which yesterday she thought broken for good
was reforged in some mysterious way. The sobbing of that old fiddle had
been his way of saying, "Forgive me; forgive!" To leave him would have
been so much easier if she had really hated him; but she did not.
However difficult it may be to live with an artist, to hate him is quite
as difficult. An artist is so flexible--only the rigid can be hated.
She hated the things he did, and him when he was doing them; but
afterward again could hate him no more than she could love him, and that
was--not at all. Resolution and a sense of the practical began to come
back with daylight. When things were hopeless, it was far better to
recognize it and harden one's heart.

Winton, whose night had been almost as sleepless--to play like a beggar
in the street, under his windows, had seemed to him the limit!--announced
at breakfast that he must see his lawyer, make arrangements for the
payment of Fiorsen's debts, and find out what could be done to secure Gyp
against persecution. Some deed was probably necessary; he was vague on
all such matters. In th