"There's something I want you to do for me," he said. "Mr. Leuba gave me a violin last night, and mamma says I ought to sell it and pay him back. Mamma says it will be a good lesson for me." The words seemed wrung from his heart's core. "I thought I'd ask you to sell it for me. The doctor says I may be sick a long time, and it worries me." He began to grow excited, and tossed from side to side.
"Don't worry," said the parson, "I'll sell it for you."
The boy looked at the violin again. To him it was priceless, and his eyes grew heavy with love for it. Then he said, cautiously: "I thought you'd get a good price for it. I don't think I could take less than a hundred dollars. It's worth more than that, but if I have to sell it, I don't think I could take less than a hundred dollars," and he fixed his burning eyes on the parson's.
"Don't worry! I'll sell it for you. Oh yes, you can easily get a hundred dollars for it. I'll bring you a hundred dollars for it by to-morrow morning."
As the parson was on the point of leaving the room, with the violin under his arm, he paused with his hand on the latch, an anxious look gathering in his face. Then he came back, laid the violin on the table, and going to the bedside, took the boy's hands in both of his own.
"David," said the moral philosopher, wrestling in his consciousness with the problem of evil—"David, was it the face of the Saviour that you wished to see? Was it this that tempted you to—" and he bent over the boy breathless.
"I wanted to see the Sleeping Beauty."
The parson turned away with a sigh of acute disappointment.
It was on this night that he was seen to enter his room with a boy's violin under his arm, and later to hang it, and hang his beloved flute, tied with a blue ribbon, above the meagre top shelf of books—Fuller's Gospel, Petrarch, Volney's Ruins, Zollicoffer's Sermons, and the Horrors of San Domingo. After that he remained motionless at his table, with his head bowed on his folded arms, until the candle went out, leaving him in inner and outer darkness. Moralist, logician, philosopher, he studied the transgression, laying it at last solely to his own charge.
At daybreak he stood outside the house with the physician who had been with the boy during the night. "Will he die?" he asked.