It was nearing the end of the programme, and Ventnor had stepped forth to play his last number.  It was a wild, eerie Hungarian air, that wailed and whispered like a lost child, then mounted up, up, louder, louder, a perfect hurricane of melody, when—­suddenly a sharp crack like a pistol shot cut the air.  The music ceased—­one of the violin strings had snapped.  At another time the great man would have finished the number on the three remaining strings, but the heat, the lax practice of a holiday season—­something, or perhaps everything combined, for the instant overcame him.  He stood like an awkward child, gazing down at the trailing, useless string.

Instantly, Archie’s sensitive brain grasped the whole situation.  Ventnor’s business manager was not with him; he had not brought a second violin.  Like a flash Archie whipped his own out of its case.  He had just come from his lesson; it was in perfect tune.  Before the shy, frail boy knew what he was actually doing he was beside the footlights, handing his own violin up to the great master, whose wonderful eyes gazed down into the small, pale face, and whose hand immediately reached out, grasping the poor, cheap little fiddle that Archie had learned his scales on.  The audience broke into applause, but with a single glance Ventnor stilled them, and dashed straight into the melody precisely where he had left off.

Archie could hardly believe his ears.  Was that his old thirty-dollar fiddle?  That marvellous thing that murmured, and wept, and laughed under the master hand!  Oh! the voice of it!  The voice of it!

They would not let Ventnor go when he smiled himself off the stage.  They called and shouted, “Encore!” “Encore!” until he returned to respond—­respond, not with his own priceless instrument, but with Archie’s, and with a grace and kindliness that only a great man possesses.  He played a good-night lullaby on the boy’s cheap little violin, and, moreover, played it as he never had before.  Archie remembered afterwards that he had presence of mind enough to get on his feet when they all sang “God Save the King,” but it really seemed a dream that Ventnor was shaking hands with him and saying, “I t’ank you, me; I t’ank you.  You save me great awkwardness.”  And then, before he knew it, he had promised to go to the hotel the next day and play for Ventnor.

All the way home he was thinking, “Fancy it!—­I, Archie Anderson, asked to play before Ventnor!” Then came the fuss and the delight of the people at home over his good fortune, but he soon slipped away to bed, exhausted with the evening’s events.  His mother, coming into the room later to say good-night, saw that close to his bed, on a table where he could reach out and touch it during the night, lay his violin.

“Motherette,” he smiled happily, “I feel that it is consecrated.”

“Keep it so, little lad of mine.  Keep both your music and your violin consecrated.”