“A stranger, sir, who accosted me in the streets not half an hour gone, and brought me, on plea of an engagement, to you his master.” “His master? Not I. I’d never set eyes on the man before.” One blank minute the musician stood staring at the speaker, then turned and, pounding down the stairs, half crying, half sobbing, as he went, “A thief, a thief, a rogue! Stop him! He’s robbed me!” burst from the door and into the street. The stranger had disappeared, the beast, the instrument--beloved pet and the means to a livelihood all vanished at a stroke. Aimless, distracted, with skirts flying, Bannister flew hither and thither seeking and questioning. Some scoffed at him, some sympathized; not one had any clue to offer. Amid that labyrinth of lanes and byways, stretching its network to the very waterside, it had been easy for the scamp to make good his escape. Exhausted and broken, the musician had to desist at last from his efforts. To do him justice, the poor fellow lamented more for his Griselda than for his instrument, though the loss of the latter presented the more desperate problem to him. He could not afford from his scanty savings enough to buy him a new harp, and without one how was he to procure himself a living? In a last hope that he might find his conclusions premature, and the truants back where he had left them, he was returning dejectedly to the scene of his bereavement, when he caught sight of the figure of Salvator peering from his own doorway. “What fortune?” quoth the medicus, with anxiety, and the other, his lips grimly pursed, only shook his head. “Come in, good man, and explain,” said the physician kindly, “since I perceive there is more here than meets the eye, and that I have been in some manner I wot not of the unconscious instrument of your undoing. Nay, by your favour. I, who have been giving good advice all my years of discretion, may yet find enough to help a fellow-creature’s necessity.” It was such a revelation of human charity that Sad Jack was moved to comply. He followed that Good Samaritan to his sanctum, and there, with some heartfelt lamenting for his ravished pet, frankly confided to sympathetic ears his circumstances and the nature of the trick which had victimized him. He had no reason to repent his candour. A practised, if a generous, reader of humankind, Salvator was soon enough convinced of the innate honesty and simplicity of soul which underlay the frozen surface of this nature. He saw a man here to be commiserated and trusted, and, in the end--to cut the story short--agreed to advance him the price of a new instrument, on the mere undertaking that he should repay the loan in such instalments as his success might justify. And to that arrangement, very delicately suggested, Bannister was persuaded to subscribe.