He kissed her and patted her affectionately on the shoulder. The girl, with a guilty feeling in her heart, crept up stairs as noiselessly as she had descended. CHAPTER XVII. Albert Langly found a new and absorbing interest in life. This interest was friendship, the pleasures of which the organist had never before experienced during his lonely and studious existence. He became a constant visitor at Braunt’s rooms and began teaching Jessie the rudiments of music, finding her a willing and apt pupil as well as a very silent one. Her gaunt face and large sorrowful eyes haunted him wherever he went, while she looked upon him with an awe such as she would have bestowed upon a being from another world; which perhaps he was, for he had certainly little relationship with this eager, money-seeking planet. Joe Braunt was quite content to sit in his armchair and smoke. However small the money is for the housekeeping, a workingman will generally contrive to provide himself with tobacco. As often as not, Braunt was absent when his daughter had her music lesson, for Mrs. Grundy has little to say about the domestic arrangements of the extreme poor. The entire absence of all world-wisdom in the young man would have made it difficult for any one to explain to him why two people who loved music should not be together as often as opportunity offered, had there been any one who took interest enough in him or in her to attempt such an explanation. The girl, who had even more than her father’s worship of harmony, was fascinated by the organist’s marvellous skill upon the instrument to which he had devoted his life, before her solemn eyes had lured his musical soul into their mystic influence. The two were lovers without either of them suspecting it. Once Langly persuaded Braunt and his daughter to go to the empty church with him and hear the grand organ. The workman and the girl sat together in the wilderness of vacant pews, and listened entranced while the sombre rhythm of the _Dead March_ filled the deserted edifice. Langly played one selection after another, for the love of the music and the love of his audience. It was a concert such as the mad king of Bavaria might have hearkened to in lonely state, but heard now by a man without a penny in his pocket and hardly a crust to eat in his squalid rooms. Whether the deft fingers of the Bavarian player soothed for the moment the demon that tortured the king, as the skill of David lulled the disquiet of Saul, who can say?--but the enchanted touch of the solitary organist on the ivory keys transported his listeners into a world where hunger was unknown.