More than the adept's cunning, that had at first tingled in his fingers at sight of the instrument, was in Harry Sanderson's playing. The violin had been the single passion which the old Satan Sanderson had carried with him into the new career. The impulse to "soothe the savage breast" had been a flare of the old character he had been reliving; but the music, begun in bravado, swept him almost instantly beyond its bounds. He had never been an indifferent performer; now he was playing as he had never played in his life, with inspiration and abandon. There was a diabolism in it. He had forgotten the fight, the crowd, his own mocking mood. He had forgotten where he was. He was afloat on a fluctuant tide of melody that was carrying him back--back--into the far-away past--toward all that he had loved and lost! "It's _Home, Sweet Home_," said Barney McGinn,--"no, it's _Annie Laurie_. No, it's--hanged if I know what it is!" The player himself could not have told him. He was in a kind of tranced dream. The self-made music was calling with a sweet insistence to buried things that were stirring from a long sleep. It sent a gulp into the throat of more than one standing moveless in the street. It brought a suspicious moisture to Tom Felder's eyes. It drew Mrs. Halloran from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. It called to a girl who crouched in the upper hall with her miserable face buried in her hands, drew her down the stair to the office door, her eyes wide with a breathless wonder, her face glistening with feeling. From the balcony Jessica had witnessed the fight without understanding its meaning. A fascination she could not gainsay had glued her eyes to the struggle. It was he--it was the face she knew, seen but once for a single moment in the hour of her marriage, but stamped indelibly upon her memory. It was no longer smooth-shaven, and it was changed, evilly changed. But it was the same! There was recklessness and mockery in it, and yet strength, not weakness. Shunned and despised as he might be--the chief actor, as it seemed to her, in a cheap and desperate bar-room affray, a coarse affair of fisticuffs in the public street--yet there was something intrepid in his bearing, something splendid in his victory. In spite of the sharp, momentary sense of antagonism that had bruised her inmost fiber, when the brutal bulk of his opponent fell she could have wept with relief! Then, suddenly, she had found that look chaining her own. It had given her a strange thrill, had both puzzled and touched her. She had dragged her eyes away with a choking sensation, a sense of helplessness and capture. When the violin sounded, a resistless rush of feeling had swept her to the lower door, where she stood behind the spectators, spellbound.