families, he made it a rule to take no pupils whose parents employed a
servant, and confined himself to children of the poorer classes, among
whom he kept up a small orchestra which played together twice a week
and never gave any concerts. And almost since the arrival of the
Marshalls in La Chance and his unceremonious entrance into the house
as, walking across the fields on a Sunday afternoon, he had heard
Professor Marshall playing the Doric Toccata on the newly installed
piano, he had spent his every Sunday evening in their big living-room.

He had seen the children appear and grow older, and adored them
with Teutonic sentimentality, especially Sylvia, whom he called his
"Moonbeam brincess," his "little ellfen fairy," and whom, when she was
still tiny, he used to take up on his greasy old knees and, resting
his violin on her head, play his wildest fantasies, that she might
feel how it "talked to her bones."

In early childhood Sylvia was so used to him that, like the others
of her circle, she accepted, indeed hardly noticed, his somewhat
startling eccentricities, his dirty linen, his face and hands to
match, his shapeless garments hanging loosely over the flabby
corpulence of his uncomely old body, his beery breath. To her, old
Reinhardt was but the queer external symbol of a never-failing
enchantment. Through the pleasant harmonious give-and-take of the
other instruments, the voice of his violin vibrated with the throbbing
passion of a living thing. His dirty old hand might shake and quaver,
but once the neck of the fiddle rested between thumb and forefinger,
the seraph who made his odd abiding-place in old Reinhardt's soul
sang out in swelling tones and spoke of heavenly things, and of the
Paradise where we might live, if we were but willing.