interval escaped
with the artist to his study on the second floor, where they spent an
hour in close consultation behind a locked door.

"Now let's go down and look in on the party," said Mr. Wing, locking a
package of letters carefully into a small drawer in his desk. Before
going down he went to his own room and changed to a suit of white
flannels in honor of the occasion.

As he was finally making for the stairway he met Veronica Lehar in the
upstairs hall. "May I use the telephone in the study?" she asked.

"Certainly," he replied, and went in and turned the light on for her and
then went on downstairs.

Shouts of laughter filled the air; the negro mammy and the gigantic
infant, together with the wheelbarrow and the feeding bottle, were
holding the stage at the end of the spacious sitting room. Slim was
being given his birthday presents and was surrounded with nonsensical
articles of every kind--toys, rattles, all-day suckers, and so forth,
and was convulsing the crowd with his antics.

The merriment went on until somebody called for Veronica to play on her
violin and she came downstairs with her violin in her hands. Then a hush
fell on the crowd, and the merrymakers listened, spellbound and
dreamy-eyed, to the strains which the passionate-eyed little Hungarian
girl drew from the fiddle resting so caressingly in the hollow of her
shoulder.

It was a plaintive, melancholy melody she played first, throbbing with
unsatisfied longing and quivering with pain and heartbreak. Sahwah
shivered and thought of ice cold rain drops falling on long dead leaves,
and the restless unhappiness seized upon her again. The melody wandered
on, and in its weird minor thirds there seemed to be all the anguish of
an oppressed people, hopeless of release from bondage; condemned to toil
in darkness forever.

Then a new note crept into the music, a note of protest, of rebellion.
Fury took the place of hopelessness; dumb resignation gave way to angry
stirrings. Fiercely the storm raged for a moment, and then subsided into
feeble murmurs, and flickered out into hopelessness again, blacker and
deeper than before. Then came flight, sudden and headlong, hurried and
confused; and days of wandering by land and sea, hours of loneliness and
homesickness, of mingled hope and fear, of faith and perplexity, ending
in a magnificent hymn of thanksgiving and praise for deliverance. It
made Sahwah think of the persecuted Jews in Russia, fleeing from