"Oh, my, Mr. Drugg! you mustn't think of entertaining me," cried the girl, cheerfully. "You have your own work to do--and customers to serve----" "Not many in this rain," he told her, smiling faintly. "Why, no--I suppose not. But don't you have orders to put up? I supposed a storekeeper was a very busy man." "I am not that kind of a storekeeper, I am afraid," returned Hopewell Drugg, shaking his head. "I have few customers now. Only a handful of people come in during the day. You see, I am on the side street here. We owned this property--mother and I. Mother was bedridden. I thought it would be easier to keep store and wait on her back in the house there, than to do most things; so I got into this line. It--it barely makes us a living," and he sighed. "But you _do_ have some business?" "Oh, yes. Old customers who know my stock is always first-class come to me regularly,--especially out-of-town people. Saturdays I manage to have quite some trade, like the Hammett Twins, and the farmers. I can't complain." "You never liked the business, then?" asked Janice, shrewdly. "No. Not that it isn't as good as most livelihoods. We all must work. And I never could do the thing I _loved_ to do. Not with mother bedridden." "And that thing was?" asked Janice. He touched the violin on the counter softly. "I had just music enough in me to be mad for it," he said, and his gray face suddenly colored faintly, for it evidently cost him something to speak so frankly. "Mother did not approve--exactly. You see, my father was a music teacher, and he never--well--'made good', as the term is now. So mother did not approve. This was father's violin--fiddle 'most folks call it. But it is very mellow and sweet--if I had only been taught properly to play it. You see, father died before I was born." Out of these few sentences, spoken so gently, Janice swiftly built, in her quick mind, the whole story of the man. His had been a life of repression--perhaps of sacrifice! The soul of music in the man had never been able to burst its chrysalis. "Mother died after I was of age. It seemed too late then for me to get into any other business," Hopewell Drugg went on to say, evenly. "You know, Miss, one gets into a rut. I was in a rut then. And we hadn't any too much money left. It was quite necessary that I do something to keep the pot a-boiling. There wasn't enough money left for music lessons, and all that. "And then----" He stopped. A queer look came over his face, and somehow the alert girl beside him knew what he was thinking of. 'Rill Scattergood was in his mind. He must have thought a great deal of the little school-mistress at one time--before he had married that other girl. Aunt Almira had said he had married 'Cinda Stone "out of spite!" Was it so?