iver--make it cry, father! Then _I_ can hear it."

He set her down carefully, still shaking his head. Her strange little
voice kept repeating: "Play for her, father! Play for her, father!"

Hopewell Drugg picked up the violin and bow from the end of the
counter. He leaned against the counter and tucked the violin under his
chin. There was only a brown light in the dusky store, and the dust
danced in the single band of sunlight that searched out a knot hole in
the wall of the back room--the shed between the store proper and the
cottage in the rear.

"Darling, I am growing old,
Silver threads among the gold----"

The old violin wailed out the tune haltingly. The deaf and blind child
caught the tremulo of the final notes, and she danced up and down and
clapped her little hands.

"I can hear that! I can hear that!" she muttered, her lips writhing to
form the sounds.

Janice felt the tears suddenly blinding her. "I'll come back and see
you again--indeed I will!" she said, brokenly, and hugging and kissing
little Lottie impetuously, she released her and ran out of the ugly,
dark little store.

It is doubtful if Hopewell Drugg even heard her. The violin was still
wailing away, while he searched out slowly the minor notes of the old,
old song.

CHAPTER VIII

A BIT OF ROMANCE

"Hopewell Drugg? Ya-as," drawled Aunt Almira. "He keeps store
'crosstown. He's had bad luck, Hopewell has. His wife's dead--she
didn't live long after Lottie was born; and Lottie--poor child!--must
be eight or nine year old."

"Poor little thing!" sighed Janice, who had come home to find her aunt
just beginning her desultory preparations for supper, and had turned in
to help. "It is so pitiful to see and hear her. Does she live all
alone there with her father?"

"I reckon Hopewell don't do business enough so's he could hire a
housekeeper. They tell me he an' the child live in a reg'lar mess!
Ain't fittin' for a man to keep house by hisself, nohow; and of course
Lottie can't do much of nothing."

"Is he an old man?" queried Janice. "I couldn't see his face very
well."

"Lawsy! he ain't what you'd call old--no," said Aunt 'Mira. "Now, let
me see; he married 'Cinda Stone when he warn't yit thirty. There was
some talk of him an' 'Rill Scattergood bein' sweet on each other onc't;
but that was twenty year ago, I do b'lieve.

"Howsomever, if there _was_ anythin' betwixt Hopewell and 'Rill, I
reckon her mother b