gs, and her
eyes darkening and lightening as the music grew deeply passionate or
brilliantly gay. When she finished, and stood, smiling and triumphant,
still holding the violin and bow, Neroda said to her:

"Are you not tired, Signorina?"

"Not a bit," cried Anita. "I feel that I could play as long as you did,
in the days of which you told me when you first came to America and would
play the violin all night long for dancers on the East Side in New York."

"I believe you could, almost," replied Neroda, smiling. "I, who had been
a concert master in Italy, was only too glad to get three dollars for
fiddling from eight in the evening until three in the morning; but they
were happy nights, because I was young and strong and full of hope and
loved my fiddle. Sometimes, when I am leading the band in my fine
uniform, I long to take the instrument away from one of the bandsmen and
play it as I did in those days, without any baton to hold me back; but
the violin is a man's instrument and requires much strength. Now, where,
Signorina, in your girlish arms and little hands, did you get such
strength?"

"It is here," said Anita, smiling and tapping her breast. "I have a
strong heart, my blood circulates well, and I am not afraid of the
violin, like most girls. I am its master, and it shall do my will."

At that she tapped her violin sharply with the bow, saying to it:

"Do you hear me? You are my slave, and I shall make you do what I wish
you to do. If I wish you to talk Brahms, you shall talk Brahms; if I
wish you to be sad, I will make you sad with funeral marches. You shall
speak Italian, German, French or English, as I tell you."

Neroda laughed with delight. He loved the imaginative nature of the
girl, who treated her violin as if it were a living thing, and whispered
her secrets into the ear of her riding horse, and told love stories to
her birds.

"In Italy," said Neroda, "a fiddler, if he really knows how to play dance
music, can dance as well as play. In those nights on the East Side, in
New York, when I played for the workmen and working girls in their cheap
finery, I went among the dancers myself while I played, and they always
gave me a round of applause and danced harder themselves."

Anita suddenly swept the strings with her bow and dashed into another
Hungarian dance of Brahms, herself taking pretty dancing steps and
pirouetting as she played, sinking upon one knee and then rising, the toe
of he