n, limiting the value of his
extemporaneous "feature," the manager reluctantly acceded.

To live for music and to have no instrument with which to express one's
emotions means a tortured privation of the spirit. Paul Burton, as he
took his seat at the piano, forgot that it was New Year's eve on
Broadway, forgot the lights, the confetti and the toy balloons. He
remembered only that here were keys which unlocked his dream-world of
music, and when he began to play the clamor of the place slowly and
quite unconsciously subsided, and quiet came--not at once, but as a
delirium may soften slowly into sleep under the stroke of a soothing
hand.

When from an outlying table a woman, grown louder of laughter than she
realized, interrupted this quiet, a score of faces turned angrily in her
direction, rebuking her with their glances.

But the music went on and the great crowd which had a few moments before
been abandoning itself to noise and riot now found itself
listening--listening in a sort of rapt trance--with its many gazes
converging on a slender young man. His pallid face and cameo features
seemed exalted and his eyes burned strangely under the dark locks that
fell across his forehead.

They did not hear the first peal of the midnight clock, until the
sudden darkness which that stroke heralded reminded them of the hour.

The place which had blazed with light was now as black as some sea-floor
cavern, and that should have been the signal for a hundred horns and
rattlers and shouts of greeting, and the reaching of hands to meet and
grasp other hands across the tables. But in Kenley's it was quiet except
for those peals of music that came from the platform. At last the
strains ended in silence, and a deep breath passed among the tables as
though from one composite pair of lungs. Then once more the instrument
spoke--spoke with a grotesque inappropriateness for a night that was not
to end till morning--for the notes that sounded across the place were
the opening bars of, "Home, Sweet Home."

There were only a few bars--and after that a loud crash as though a
number of hands had simultaneously fallen, with violence, upon the
keys--and then the lights blazed again from all the opalescent
chandeliers and all the wall brackets.

Instantly from tables near the center two young women, in paper caps,
leaped up from their seats and kissed the men and women of their party.
A wave of greetings swept the place.

Across one end of t