There were fifteen recalls from the wings, Abrahm Kantor standing counting them off on his fingers, and trembling to receive the Stradivarius.  Then, finally, and against the frantic negative pantomime of his manager, a scherzo, played so lacily that it swept the house in lightest laughter.

When Leon Kantor finally completed his program, they were loath to let him go, crowding down the aisles upon him, applauding up, down, round him, until the great disheveled house was like the roaring of a sea, and he would laugh and throw out his arm in wide-spread helplessness, and always his manager in the background, gesticulating against too much of his precious product for the money, ushers already slamming up chairs, his father’s arms out for the Stradivarius, and, deepest in the gloom of the wings, Sarah Kantor, in a rocker especially dragged out for her, and from the depths of the black-silk reticule, darning his socks.

“Bravo—­bravo!  Give us the ’Humoresque’—­Chopin nocturne—­polonaise—­’Humoresque’! Bravo—­bravo!”

And even as they stood, hatted and coated, importuning and pressing in upon him, and with a wisp of a smile to the fourth left box, Leon Kantor played them the “Humoresque” of Dvorak, skedaddling, plucking, quirking—­that laugh on life with a tear behind it.  Then suddenly, because he could escape no other way, rushed straight back for his dressing-room, bursting in upon a flood of family already there before him.  Isadora Kantor, blue-shaven, aquiline, and already greying at the temples; his five-year-old son, Leon; a soft little pouter-pigeon of a wife, too, enormous of bust, in glittering ear-drops and a wrist-watch of diamonds half buried in chubby wrist; Miss Esther Kantor, pink and pretty; Rudolph; Boris, not yet done with growing-pains.

At the door, Miss Kantor met her brother, her eyes as sweetly moist as her kiss.

“Leon, darling, you surpassed even yourself!”

“Quit crowding, children!  Let him sit down.  Here, Leon, let mamma give you a fresh collar.  Look how the child’s perspired!  Pull down that window, Boris.  Rudolph, don’t let no one in.  I give you my word if to-night wasn’t as near as I ever came to seeing a house go crazy.  Not even that time in Milan, darlink—­when they broke down the doors, was it like to-night—­”

“Ought to seen, ma, the row of police outside—­”

“Hush up, Roody!  Don’t you see your brother is trying to get his breath?”

From Mrs. Isadore Kantor:  “You ought to seen the balconies, mother.  Isadore and I went up just to see the jam.”

“Six thousand dollars in the house to-night if there was a cent,” said Isadore Kantor.

“Hand me my violin please, Esther.  I must have scratched it, the way they pushed.”

“No, son; you didn’t.  I’ve already rubbed it up.  Sit quiet, darlink!”

He was limply white, as if the vitality had flowed out of him.