A private chivalry

Appletons’ Town and Country Library No. 291
PRIVATE CHIVALRY
A NOVEL
BY FRANCIS LYNDE AUTHOR OF A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT, THE HELPERS, ETC.
Acts more dangerous, but less famous because they were but private chivalries. Sir Philip Sidney
NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1900
Copyright, 1900, By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. All rights reserved.
A PRIVATE CHIVALRY
The lights of Silverette were beginning to prick the dusk in the valley, and the clanging of a piano, diminished to a harmonious tinkling, floated up the mountain on the still air of the evening. At the Jessica workings, a thousand feet above the valley, even the clangour of a tuneless piano had its compensations; and to one of the two men sitting on the puncheon-floored porch of the assayer’s cabin the minimized tinkling was remindful of care-free student ramblings in the land of the zither. But the other had no such pleasant memories, and he rose and relighted his cigar.
“That is my cue, Ned. I must go down and do that whereunto I have set my hand.”
“‘Must,’ you say; that implies necessity. I don’t see it.”
“I couldn’t expect you to see or to understand the necessity; but it is there, all the same.”