“It’s evident you’ve attached one more devoted follower to your train, Red,” whispered Winifred Chester, in an interval of the violin playing.

“Well, he’s a devotee worth having,” answered Burns, watching his protege as Franz looked over a pile of music with Ellen, signifying his pleasure every time they came upon familiar sheets.  The two had found common ground in their love of the most emotional of all the arts, and Ellen had discovered rare delight in accompanying that ardent violin in some of the scores both knew and loved.

“He’s as handsome as a picture to-night, isn’t he?” Winifred pursued.  “How Arthur’s old blue suit transforms him.  And wasn’t it clever of Ellen to have him wear that soft white shirt with the rolling collar and flowing black tie?  It gives him the real musician’s look.”

“Trust you women to work for dramatic effects,” murmured Burns.  “Here we go—­and I’ll wager it’ll be something particularly telling, judging by the way they both look keyed up to it.  Ellen plays like a virtuoso herself to-night, doesn’t she?”

“It’s enough to inspire any one to have that fiddle at her shoulder,” remarked James Macauley, who, hanging over the couch, had been listening to this bit of talk.

The performance which followed captured them all, even practical and energetic Martha Macauley, who had often avowed that she considered the study of music a waste of time in a busy world.

“Though I think, after all,” she observed to Arthur Chester, who lounged by her side, revelling in the entertainment with the zest of the man who would give his whole time to affairs like these if it were not necessary for him to make a living at the practice of some more prosaic profession, “it’s quite as much the interest of having such a stagey character performing for us as it is his music.  Did you ever see any human being throw his whole soul into anything like that?  One couldn’t help but watch him if he weren’t making a sound.”

“It’s certainly refreshing, in a world where we all try to cover up our real feelings, to see anybody give himself away so naively as that,” Chester replied.  “But there’s no doubt about the quality of his music.  He was born, not made.  And, by George, Len certainly plays up to him.  I didn’t know she had it in her, for all I’ve been admiring her accomplishments for four years.”

“Ellen’s all temperament, anyway,” said Ellen’s sister.

Chester looked at her curiously.  Martha was a fine-looking young woman, in a very wholesome and clean-cut fashion.  There was no feminine artfulness in the way she bound her hair smoothly upon her head, none in the plain cut of her simple evening attire, absolutely none in her manner.  Glancing from Martha to her sister, as he had often done before in wonderment at the contrast between them, he noted as usual how exquisitely Ellen was dressed, though quite as simply, in a way, as her practical sister.  But in every line of her smoke-blue silken frock was the most subtle art, as Chester, who had a keen eye for such matters and a fastidious taste, could readily recognize.  From the crown of her dark head to the toe of the blue slipper with which she pressed the pedal of the great piano which she had brought from her old home in the South, she was a picture to feast one’s eyes upon.