"I know," he said. "As I must be with you, and am! But I will wait to tell you the rest, until I can tell it all."
She accepted the frank reticence. They walked home more quietly than they had come, each busied with thought.
But Adriance did not forget to stop at the antique shop for the guitar. The proprietor lived in the rear of the shabby frame building and willingly admitted his two customers, after examining them beneath a raised corner of the sun-bleached green curtain.
"The guitar?" he echoed Adriance's request. "For madame? But certainly!"
He produced the instrument from the window with deferential alacrity. He was a thin, bright-eyed French Jew; quite ugly and quite old enough in appearance to justify Elsie's assertion that he was the Wandering Jew and this the very shop of Hawthorne's tale. She smiled at him with a mischievous recollection of this, as she pulled off her gloves to finger the rusty strings.
"It is a good guitar," she approved. "And gay, with all this mother-of-pearl inlay and the little colored stones set in the pegs! But these wire strings must come off, Anthony. They are too loud and too harsh."
"It is so, madame," the old man nodded entire agreement, before Adriance could speak. "The guitar was used on the stage, where loudness——!" He shrugged. "Never would you guess, madame, who brought that instrument in to me last week."
"No?" Elsie wondered, politely interested.
"It was that enormous Russian who formerly rode beside your husband in the motor wagon, madame. He has not a head, that Michael, but he has a heart. About the cinés he is mad—the moving pictures, I would say. Well then, into the poor boarding-house where he lives came an actress. She was out of work, or she would not have been there, bien sur! The guitar was hers. Michael brought it here to sell for her. I believe she is sick. Because she is of the stage, he is a slave to her."
"He is in love?"