"My dear Tom," exclaimed Miss Hinsdale, "you forget Wetherford Swift!"
"I could stand it all," put forth the widower, "if it were not for
Wetherford Swift."
"When is Miss Sherwood coming home?" asked one of the ladies. "Why does
she stay away and leave him to his sufferings?"
"Us to his sufferings," substituted a bachelor. "He is just beginning;
listen."
Through all the other sounds of music, there penetrated from an unseen
source, a sawish, scraped, vibration of catgut, pathetic, insistent,
painstaking, and painful beyond belief.
"He is in a terrible way to-night," said the widower.
Miss Hinsdale laughed. "Worse every night. The violinist is young
Wetherford Swift," she explained to Harkless. "He is very much in love,
and it doesn't agree with him. He used to be such a pleasant boy, but last
winter he went quite mad over Helen Sherwood, Mr. Meredith's cousin, our
beauty, you know--I am so sorry she isn't here; you'd be interested in
meeting her, I'm sure--and he took up the violin."
"It is said that his family took up chloroform at the same time," said the
widower.
"His music is a barometer," continued the lady, "and by it the
neighborhood nightly observes whether Miss Sherwood has been nice to him
or not."
"It is always exceedingly plaintive," explained another.
"Except once," rejoined Miss Hinsdale. "He played jigs when she came home
from somewhere or other, in June."
"It was Tosti's 'Let Me Die,' the very next evening," remarked the
widower.
"Ah," said one of the bachelors, "but his joy was sadder for us than his
misery. Hear him now."
"I think he means it for 'What's this dull town to me,'" observed another,
with some rancor. "I would willingly make the town sufficiently exciting
for him--"
"If there were not an ordinance against the hurling of missiles," finished
the widower.
The piano executing the funeral march ceased to execute, discomfited by
the persistent and overpowering violin; the banjo and the coster-songs
were given over; even the collegians' music was defeated; and the
neighborhood was forced to listen to the dauntless fiddle, but not without
protest, for there came an indignant, spoken chorus from the quarter
whence the college songs had issued: "Ya-a-ay! Wetherford, put it away!
She'll come back!" The violin played on.
"We all know each other here, you see, Mr. Harkless," Miss Hinsdale smiled
benignantly.
"They didn't bother Mr. Wetherford Swift," said the widower. "Not that
time. Do you hear him?--'Could ye come back to me, Douglas'?"
"Oh, but it isn't absence that is killing him and his friends," cried one
of the young women. "It is Brainard Macauley."
"That is a mistake," said Tom Meredith, as easily as he could. "There
goes Jim's double quartette. Listen, and you will hear them try to----"