"The--flowers--thanks!"

"My father, he sent them. Come, father--quick!"

Suddenly there was a tight tensity that seemed to crowd up the little
room.

"Abrahm--quick--get Hancock--that first rows of chairs has got to be
moved--there he is, in the wings--see the piano ain't dragged down too
far! Leon, got your mute on your pocket? Please Mr. Ginsberg--you must
excuse--Here, Leon, is your glass of water. Drink it, I say. Shut that
door out there, boy, so there ain't a draft in the wings. Here, Leon,
your violin. Got neckerchief? Listen how they're shouting--it's for
you--Leon--darlink--go!"

In the center of that vast human bowl which had finally shouted itself
out, slim, boylike, and in his supreme isolation, Leon Kantor drew bow
and a first thin, pellucid, and perfect note into a silence breathless
to receive it.

Throughout the arduous flexuosities of the Mendelssohn E-minor concerto,
singing, winding from tonal to tonal climax, and out of the slow
movement, which is like a tourniquet twisting the heart into the
spirited _allegro molto vivace_, it was as if beneath Leon Kantor's
fingers the strings were living vein-cords, youth, vitality, and the
very foam of exuberance racing through them.

That was the power of him--the Vichy and the sparkle of youth, so that,
playing, the melody poured round him like wine and went down seething