still kindness--tender and still. His face was like a
gray morning sky of summer from whose level cloud-fields rain will fall
before noon.

'So it was you,' he said, 'playing the violin so well?'

'I was doin' my best,' answered Robert. 'But eh! Mr. Ericson, I wad hae
dune better gin I had kent ye was hearkenin'.'

'You couldn't do better than your best,' returned Eric, smiling.

'Ay, but yer best micht aye grow better, ye ken,' persisted Robert.

'Come into my room,' said Ericson. 'This is Friday night, and there is
nothing but chapel to-morrow. So we'll have talk instead of work.'

In another moment they were seated by a tiny coal fire in a room one
side of which was the slope of the roof, with a large, low skylight in
it looking seawards. The sound of the distant waves, unheard in Robert's
room, beat upon the drum of the skylight, through all the world of mist
that lay between it and them--dimly, vaguely--but ever and again with a
swell of gathered force, that made the distant tumult doubtful no more.

'I am sorry I have nothing to offer you,' said Ericson.

'You remind me of Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate of the temple,'
returned Robert, attempting to speak English like the Northerner, but
breaking down as his heart got the better of him. 'Eh! Mr. Ericson,
gin ye kent what it is to me to see the face o' ye, ye wadna speyk like
that. Jist lat me sit an' leuk at ye. I want nae mair.'

A smile broke up the cold, sad, gray light of the young eagle-face.
Stern at once and gentle when in repose, its smile was as the summer of
some lovely land where neither the heat nor the sun shall smite them.
The youth laid his hand upon the boy's head, then withdrew it hastily,
and the smile vanished like the sun behind a cloud. Robert saw it, and
as if he had been David before Saul, rose instinctively and said,

'I'll gang for my fiddle.--Hoots! I hae broken ane o' the strings. We
maun bide till the morn. But I want nae fiddle mysel' whan I hear the
great water oot there.'

'You're young yet, my boy, or you might hear voices in that water--!
I've lived in the sound of it all my days. When I can't rest at night, I
hear a moaning and crying in the dark, and I lie and listen till I can't
tell whether I'm a man or some God-forsaken sea in the sunless north.'

'Sometimes I believe in naething but my fiddle,' answered Robert.

'Yes, yes. But when it comes into you, my boy! You won't hear much music
in the cry of the sea