"Oh, I am so glad!" cried Hildegarde. "I haven't had any music the last two summers. I had everything else that was nice, but still I missed it, of course. Do you play, or sing?"
"A little of both," said Jack modestly.
"Oh, how delightful! We must make music together for mamma sometimes. My own piano has not come yet, but there is the dearest old funny thing here which belonged to the Misses Aytoun."
"Uncle Tom has no piano," said Jack, "but I have my violin, so I don't mind."
"Oh, a violin!" said Hildegarde, opening her eyes wide. "Have you been studying it long?"
"Ever since I was six years old," was the reply. "My mother would not let me begin earlier, though my father said that as soon as I could hold a knife and fork I could hold a bow. He's a little cracked about violins, my father. He makes them, you know."
"I don't know," cried Hildegarde. "Tell me about it; how very interesting!"
"Well—I don't mean that it's his business," said Jack, who seemed to have forgotten his shyness entirely; "he's a lawyer, you know. But it's the only thing he really cares about. He has a workshop, and he has made—oh, ever so many violins! He went to Cremona once, and spent a year there, poking about, and he found an old church that was going to be repaired, and bought the sounding-board. Oh, it must have been a couple of hundred years old. Then he moused about more and found an old fellow, a descendant of one of Amati's workmen, and I believe he would have bought him, too, if he could; but, anyhow, they were great chums, and he taught my father all kinds of tricks. When he came home he made this violin out of a piece of the old sounding-board, and gave it to me on my birthday. It's—oh, it's no end, you know! And he made another for himself, and we play together. Do you know the Mozart Concerto in F, for two violins? It begins with an allegro."
And being fairly mounted on his hobby, Jack Ferrers pranced about on it as if he had done nothing but talk to Hildegarde all his life. Hildegarde, meanwhile, listened with a mixture of surprise, amusement, and respect. He did not look in the least like a musical genius, this long-legged, curly-haired lad, with his blue eyes and his simple, honest face. She thought of the lion front of Beethoven, and the brilliant, exquisite beauty of Mozart, and tried to imagine honest Jack standing between them, and almost laughed in the midst of an animated description of the andante movement. Then she realised that he was talking extremely well, and talking a great deal over her head.
"I am afraid you will find me very ignorant," she said meekly, when her cousin paused, a little out of breath, but with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes. "I have heard a great deal of music, of course, and I love it dearly; but I don't know about it as you do, not a bit. I play the piano a little, and I sing, just simple old songs, you know, and that is all."