The couple grasped avidly at the opportunity to live with him. The youth had already evaporated from Rose’s countenance; her minute mouth and constantly lifted eyebrows expressed an inwardly-gratifying sense of superiority, an effect strengthened by her thin, affected speech. Across her narrow brow a fringe of hair fell which she was continually crimping with an iron heated in the kitchen stove, permeating the room with a lingering and villainous odor of burned hair.

William Vibard was a man with a passion—the accordion. He arrived with the instrument in a glossy black paper box, produced it at the first opportunity, and sat by the stove drawing it out to incredible lengths in the production of still more incredible sounds. He held one boxlike end, with its metallic stops, by his left ear, while his right hand, unfalteringly fixed in the strap of the other end, operated largely in the region of his stomach.

He had a book of instructions and melodies printed in highly-simplified and explanatory bars, which he balanced on his knee while he struggled in their execution.

He was a youth of large, palpable bones, joints and knuckles; his face was long and preternaturally pale, and bore an abstracted expression which deepened almost to idiocy when bent above the quavering, unaccountable accordion.

The Vibard baby was alarmingly little, with a bluish face; and, as if in protest against her father’s interminable noise, lay wrapped in a knitted red blanket without a murmur, without a stir of her midgelike form, hour upon hour.