“Ah, now that’s a mighty queer story, Mr. Noll. It’s the victim of the grand passion that man is; Vanus rest his soul. Victim? begod!—he’s the hero of a romance that’s kept a holt of him since his chin began the need of shavin’—and that’s as long as your grandfather or mine can remimber the seasons. That man has just played on the music of his little love-affair until he’s clean pulled the cat-gut out of the old fiddle—plucked at the shtrings of the old melody until he’s torn the bowels out of the old harpsichord of Romance.... Sure, my father shaved him before me, and remembered the day it got about that the girl’s father swore he’d have no damned Frenchified poetaster for son-in-law. And the little gintleman’s been lovin’ the girl ever since, until there’s only the memory of them both left to each other. He might have married the little lady this forty years—the divil a soul to prevent it—but——”
He shrugged his shoulders, and gave up the tangle.
“Well?” asked Noll.
“Well, he goes and walks before her doorway every evenin’, as the twilight falls, and sometimes they take a stroll together. And—by the same token! she lives in the same house where Miss Betty lodges——”
Noll rose to his feet.
“Where?”
The barber was startled.
Noll strode up to him:
“Where does Miss Betty live?” he asked, hoarsely.
The little barber gazed at him: