"Don't leave me," said the youth, anxiously. "Come listen to my old friend here, and we will talk between the dances."
"Leave you?" replied the young girl; "you do not know, you cannot guess how happy I am to see you again."
"And I," answered the youth, smiling softly, "I can feel how beautiful everything is around me when you are near. Did you know how my father loved you, and how he grieved over it when you left us?"
"Did he?" answered Mary, with a low sob, "how often I thought of you and him; but he must have known where we went."
"Not till Frederick came back at vacation; soon after you began to write, Mary. Then he was so pleased to hear from you. We heard you had been taken from the Alms-House."
"Music, music!" clamored the dancers once more. The young man took up his bow with a sigh.
"Listen, listen," he said, softly, drawing it across the strings. "Do you remember the music we had that night? I will give it to you again."
He began to play, and while others were dancing merrily, she listened till her young heart filled and her eyes were crowded full of tears. She remembered that small room high up in a city dwelling. The furniture was scant but neat, and so daintily arranged. The bright cooking-stove, the bird-cage, the little round work-stand, above all, the handsome, cheerful woman, with her household love and genial benevolence, Isabel Chester's mother—how vividly the sight of that young minstrel brought all this to her memory.
The music was ringing cheerily through the barn, which trembled to the buoyant movements of the dancers, till the garlands shook upon the walls, and all the lights seemed to twinkle and reel with sympathetic motion. But the face of the violinist grew sad in its expression, and as Mary Fuller gazed at it through her tears, her heart trembled within her, though a gleam of most exquisite pleasure lay at the bottom—pleasure so unlike anything she had ever felt that its very newness made her tremble.
"Don't you dance, Mary?" inquired the musician, speaking to her, but without a break in his music.