With a sidelong glance at his parents, he picked up the instrument--John Holly had not forgotten his own youth.

His violin-playing in the old days had not been welcome, he remembered.
"A fiddle! Who plays ?" he asked.
"David." "Oh, the boy.

You say you--took him in?
By the way, what an odd little shaver he is! Never did I see a BOY like HIM." Simeon Holly's head came up almost aggressively.
"David is a good boy--a very good boy, indeed, John.

We think a great deal of him." John Holly laughed lightly, yet his brow carried a puzzled frown.

Two things John Holly had not been able thus far to understand: an indefinable change in his father, and the position of the boy David, in the household--John Holly was still remembering his own repressed youth.
"Hm-m," he murmured, softly picking the strings, then drawing across them a tentative bow.