The man walked thoughtfully on, seemingly as one who was turning over and over in his mind some difficult, delicate matter, looking at it on all sides and in every light, as he must do.

Finally he quickened his pace as though having decided what ought to be done.  He looked the happier for his decision.

III

That night in an attic-like room of an old building opposite Morningside Park a tiny supper-table for two stood ready in the middle of the floor; the supper itself, the entire meal, was spread.  There is a victory which human nature in thousands of lives daily wins over want, that though it cannot drive poverty from the scene, it can hide its desolation by the genius of choice and of touch.  A battle of that brave and desperate kind had been won in this garret.  Lacking every luxury, it had the charm of tasteful bareness, of exquisite penury.  The supper-table of cheap wood roughly carpentered was hidden under a piece of fine long-used table-linen; into the gleaming damask were wrought clusters of snowballs.  The glare of a plain glass lamp was softened by a too costly silk shade.  Over the rim of a common vase hung a few daffodils, too costly daffodils.  The supper, frugal to a bargain, tempted the eye and the appetite by the good sense with which it had been chosen and prepared.  Thus the whole scene betokened human nature at bay but victorious in the presence of that wolf, whose near-by howl startles the poor out of their sleep.

Into this empty room sounds penetrated through a door.  They proceeded from piano-keys evidently so old that one wondered whether possibly they had not begun to be played on in the days of Beethoven, whether they were not such as were new on the clavichord of Bach.  The fingers that pressed them were unmistakably those of a child.  As the hands wandered up and down the keyboard, the ear now and then took notice of a broken string.  There were many of these broken strings.  The instrument plainly announced itself to be a remote, well-nigh mythical ancestor of the modern piano, preternaturally lingering on amid an innumerable deafening progeny.  It suggested a superannuated human being whose loudest utterances have sunk to ghostly whispers in a corner.

Once the wandering hands stopped and a voice was heard.  It sounded as though pitched to reach some one in an inner room farther away, possibly a person who might just have passed from a kitchen to a bedroom to make some change of dress.  It was a very affectionate voice, very true and sweet, very tender, very endearing.

“Another string snapped to-day.  There’s another key silent.  There won’t be any but silent keys soon.”

There must have been a reply.  Responding to it, the voice at the piano sounded again, this time very loyal and devoted to an object closer at hand: 

“But when we do get a better one, we won’t kick the old one down-stairs.  It has done its best.”