painter’s, and paid frequent visits to his studio; and it was there he first met Madelon and her father.  He did not much affect M. Linders’ company, but he took a fancy to the child, as indeed most people did, and made her promise that she would come and see him; and when she had once found her way, and been welcomed to his little bare room, where an old piano, a violin, and heaps of dusty folios of music, were the principal furniture, a day seldom passed without her paying him a visit.  She would perch herself at his window, which commanded a wide view over the city, with its countless roofs, and domes, and towers, and beyond the encircling hills, with their scattered villas, and slopes of terraced gardens, and pines, and olives, all under the soft blue transparent sky; and with her eyes fixed on this sunny view, Madelon would go off into some dreamy fit, as she listened to the violinist, of whose playing she never wearied.  He was devoted to his art, though he had never attained to any remarkable proficiency in it; and at any hour of the day he might be heard scraping, and tuning, and practising, for he belonged to the orchestra of one of the theatres.  It was quite a new sensation for Madelon to hear so much music in private life, and she thought it all beautiful—­ tuning and scraping and all.

“But that is all rubbish,” the German would cry, after spending an hour in going through some trashy modern Italian music.  “Now, my child, you shall hear something worth listening to;” and with a sigh of relief he would turn to some old piece by Mozart or Bach, some minuet of Haydn’s, some romance of Beethoven’s, which he would play with no great power of execution, indeed, but with a rare sweetness and delicacy of touch and expression, and with an intense absorption in the music, which communicated itself to even so small a listener as Madelon.

It would have been hard to say which of the two had the more enjoyment—­she, as she sat motionless, her chin propped on her two hands, her brown eyes gazing into space, and a hundred dreamy fancies vaguely shaped by the music, flitting through her brain; or he, as he bent over his violin, lovingly exacting the sweet sounds, and his thoughts—­who knows where? —­ anywhere, one may be sure, rather than in the low-ceiled, dusty garret, redolent of tobacco smoke, and not altogether free from a suspicion of onions.

“There, my child,” he would say at the end, “that is music—­ that is art!  What I was playing before was mere rubbish—­trash, unworthy of me and of my violin.”

“And why do you play it?” asks Madelon, simply.

“Ah! why indeed?” said the violinist—­“because one must live, my little Frauelein; and since they will play nothing else at the theatre, I must play it also, or I should be badly off.”

“You are not rich, then?” said Madelon.

“Rich enough,” he answered.  “I gain enough to live upon, and I ask no more.”

“Why don’t you make money like papa?” says Madelon; “then you could play what you liked, you know.  We are very rich sometimes.”