When the stars above are brightly shining,
Because they’ve nothing else to do?”
Of all Mr. Blair’s listeners the only one who wore an expression not in sympathy with the pretty tuneful old song was Catullus; and even he, sitting in a Yellow Book attitude, exhibited the grace of magnanimous forbearance. So rapt were the others in the charm of listening, they paid no heed to “a new step on the floor” of the adjoining room. It was a pattering little step, much as if a mouse was scuttling through the house; and at once the door opened, and in came a tiny, bright-eyed old lady, fully dressed and wide-awake, although her cap was a tiny bit askew.
“Granny!” cried her family in a voice.
“You didn’t think, Terry, my boy, that I could stop upstairs in bed, and hear you sing the old songs down below,” answered Granny, unabashed.
“You’re like the ‘good ould Oirish gintlemen, all of the oulden toime,’ Granny,” said Maurice, bringing forward her especial chair. “Don’t you remember how he was supposed to be defunct, and his friends were ‘waking’ him, and the candles were lighted around his bed? The corpse stood all the rest, but when the whisky corks began to pop, he just sprang up and shouted, ‘Whoop! Murther! d’ye think I’ll be lying here dead, when such good stuff as that is flying around my head?’”
“For shame, saucy boy,” said Granny, giving her pet a little tap upon his hand that still clasped hers. “No supper, thanks; I couldn’t survive it, really; and not a wee drop of the punch, even. Just go on with your nonsense, good people, and let me listen. But first come here, Kathleen, child, and tell me how you stood your trial.”
“Let me settle your dear old cap, then,” replied Kathleen, proceeding to put her offer into execution. “It’s all right about me, Granny; I’m a gold mine, as you’ll say when you know what Mrs. Beaumoris is going to pay me for playing at her party. And as to what Herr Levitsky said, that will keep for to-morrow. Now, papa, we want ‘Widow Malone,’ as only you can sing it.”
“And afterward,” added Thorndyke, with effusion uncommon in that measured personage, “Miss Blair will surely not refuse to give us a taste of her quality on the violin.”
Therefore, in due course, Miss Blair, standing under the old clock, lifted her fiddle-bow, and lo! the air about them thrilled with exquisite sound. What she chose first to reproduce was the quaint German Christmas hymn, “Joseph, lieber, Joseph, mein,” written by Calvisius five hundred years before. Then without warning she broke into Granny’s favorite Irish jig, playing it with such resistless vim and merriment that every foot in the room began involuntarily to keep time, and every face wreathed itself into a smile. As quickly again the measure changed, and now Kathleen was back in Crichton’s studio, and her hour of triumph was lived again.