The rain was pouring down with no promise of a let-up, and Janice did not have even an umbrella. She took off her coat and hung her hat to dry on the back of a chair.
"I shall have to be company for a while, I expect, Mr. Drugg," she said, laughing.
"You are more than welcome, Miss Janice," returned the storekeeper, as he put down his instrument again. "Is the child all right?"
"She will be busy there for an hour, I think," declared Janice.
"I--I am afraid I shall scarcely know how to entertain you, Miss," said Drugg, hesitatingly. "We have little company. I--I have a few books----"
"Oh, my, Mr. Drugg! you mustn't think of entertaining me," cried the girl, cheerfully. "You have your own work to do--and customers to serve----"
"Not many in this rain," he told her, smiling faintly.
"Why, no--I suppose not. But don't you have orders to put up? I supposed a storekeeper was a very busy man."
"I am not that kind of a storekeeper, I am afraid," returned Hopewell Drugg, shaking his head. "I have few customers now. Only a handful of people come in during the day. You see, I am on the side street here. We owned this property--mother and I. Mother was bedridden. I thought it would be easier to keep store and wait on her back in the house there, than to do most things; so I got into this line. It--it barely makes us a living," and he sighed.
"Oh, yes. Old customers who know my stock is always first-class come to me regularly,--especially out-of-town people. Saturdays I manage to have quite some trade, like the Hammett Twins, and the farmers. I can't complain."
"You never liked the business, then?" asked Janice, shrewdly.
"No. Not that it isn't as good as most livelihoods. We all must work. And I never could do the thing I _loved_ to do. Not with mother bedridden."
He touched the violin on the counter softly. "I had just music enough in me to be mad for it," he said, and his gray face suddenly colored faintly, for it evidently cost him something to speak so frankly. "Mother did not approve--exactly. You see, my father was a music teacher, and he never--well--'made good', as the term is now. So mother did not approve. This was father's violin--fiddle 'most folks call it. But it is very mellow and sweet--if I had only been taught properly to play it. You see, father died before I was born."