“He looks just like Tramp,” she said one day as she mounted the stairway, and Tramp was a great mongrel, part Dane, part collie, that lived somewhere on the street. “He looks exactly like Tramp,” she said. She was dressing for his coming, working her hair into the shapes Conway liked, her lips withdrawing from the tunes Albert wanted played. “Oh, Lord! his _Leave Home Rags_ and his _My Mandy Lanes_” she said. Later she would play them for him, plucking the strings quaintly and withdrawing them from their meanings. When he had first come back from his agricultural college he had talked of a girl named Judith. He still wrote to her, but seldom spoke of her now. He would settle into his chair with a great sigh of content, turning the letter addressed to Judith over and over in his hands, a letter he had forgotten to mail. When he talked of himself he came immediately to the subject that most concerned the farmers, the success of the tobacco pool. Sometimes he seemed cautious as he handled some letter from Judith, turning it about, as if he clung to it. He would beg Theodosia to play the new song he had brought, for he had come then to have her play a song. “Gosh, you’re the only girl in town can play,” he said. “Fiddle or piano, it’s all one to her. And works either single or double.” “Lady broke. Bridle wise. A right good five-gaited saddle mare,” she said. She would withdraw behind the neglected thumping of the piano or the plucked strings, indifferent to the tune but willing enough to accommodate a caller. When she had embarrassed him she would laugh a low laughter and let her eyes close over the music as she trailed it off into some theme she liked. “Lady broke.... I didn’t call you that,” he said heavily. “I didn’t say it.” * * * * * In autumn it was reported that a musician was coming to Lester, a larger town ten miles away, to teach violin-playing there. Word was spread about that she would visit Anneville one morning each week if three students could be found for her there. Theodosia and two half-grown children made up the number, and the teacher came. She was a small dark woman, slight in form, quick in her ways, heavy-browed, ambitious to become a great teacher. Old Anthony Bell engaged her to come to his house, had sent for her as soon as he had heard of her presence in the town, and had talked with her in the parlor, grown coherent, alert under the stimulation of the young woman. She made him remember his _Heart Bowed Downs_ and his _Trovatores_.