"Don't worry," said the parson, "I'll sell it for you."
The boy looked at the violin again. To him it was priceless, and his eyes grew heavy with love for it. Then he said, cautiously: "I thought _you'd_ get a good price for it. I don't think I could take less than a hundred dollars. It's worth more than that, but if I have to sell it, I don't think I _could_ take less than a hundred dollars," and he fixed his burning eyes on the parson's.
"Don't worry! I'll sell it for you. Oh yes, you can easily get a hundred dollars for it. I'll bring you a hundred dollars for it by to-morrow morning."
As the parson was on the point of leaving the room, with the violin under his arm, he paused with his hand on the latch, an anxious look gathering in his face. Then he came back, laid the violin on the table, and going to the bedside, took the boy's hands in both of his own.
"David," said the moral philosopher, wrestling in his consciousness with the problem of evil--"David, was it the face of the Saviour that you wished to see? Was it _this_ that tempted you to--" and he bent over the boy breathless.
The parson turned away with a sigh of acute disappointment.
It was on this night that he was seen to enter his room with a boy's violin under his arm, and later to hang it, and hang his beloved flute, tied with a blue ribbon, above the meagre top shelf of books--Fuller's _Gospel_, Petrarch, Volney's _Ruins_, Zollicoffer's _Sermons_, and the _Horrors of San Domingo_. After that he remained motionless at his table, with his head bowed on his folded arms, until the candle went out, leaving him in inner and outer darkness. Moralist, logician, philosopher, he studied the transgression, laying it at last solely to his own charge.
At daybreak he stood outside the house with the physician who had been with the boy during the night. "Will he die?" he asked.
The physician tapped his forehead with his forefinger. "The chances are against him. The case has peculiar complications. All night it has been nothing but the wax figures and the stolen quarter and the violin. His mother has tried to persuade him not to sell it. But he won't bear the sight of it now, although he is wild at the thought of selling it."