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bFAlexa/dfi^ Lowell
This story was written from the Photoplay of ROBERT LEONARD
There came a rap at the door, a little, timid rap ; then more firmly, as if impelled by a courage of desperation. Earl dropped his violin hastily. "Who can it be," he asked his mother, ' ' at this hour of the night?"
On the threshold, under the feebly struggling gas-jet that laid bare in its wan piteousness the sordidness of the ailing stairs, the gaping plaster of the walls, the mouldy touch of unlovely poverty, stood a slip of a girl, with delicate, white face. Two black eyes looked up into Earl's — eyes with a strange pain in them.
"Are you" — the voice was very low-pitched and tremulous — "are you the melody man?"
"I am Earl Dean," he answered gently. ' ' Wont you please come in ? "
Tears struggled to the black eyes. "I want to," she said brokenly. "I — I live across the hall; my mother worked for us because I — I cant see. Last week she — died. It's been so lonely since — I thought you might — "
She got no further. Two enfolding arms drew her across the doorway and into the room. A voice, vibrant
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with the mother-note, whispered tendernesses in her ear. The sorrow at her heart gave vent to an ecstasy of tears.
It is a bitter thing when a soul aflame with genius, surcharged with melody, has for its boon companion poverty. It is a bitter thing when the heaven-born music in a heart must well up thru hosts of strangling fears, petty anxieties, fearful dependencies.
It had been so with Earl Dean. The music in him had lived because it had its birth in a fount of depthless purity. He had had no rainbow-hued inspiration to give him stimulus and urge. Living from hand to mouth, eking out a precarious livelihood for his aging mother and himself, Genius had had much ado to keep her roseate wings unfurled. And now into his life came a love as pure as the wellspring of his genius, a love that lived and had its being like some lovely flower — "the sweetest things that God ever made and forgot to put a soul into." It unfolded itself to him in the long evenings when he sat