noon
But to-day he was not looking at the sky , instead , he was staring at the black , dusty rafters of his kitchen , where hung dried meats and strings of onions and bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins . But old Abel saw not these things ; his face was the face of a man who beholds visions , compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain , for old Abel was seeing what he might have been -- and what he was ; as he always saw when Felix Moore played to him on the violin . And the awful joy of dreaming that he was young again , with unspoiled life before him , was so great and compelling that it counterbalanced the agony in the realization of a dishonoured old age , following years in which he had squandered the wealth of his soul in ways where Wisdom lifted not her voice . Felix Moore was standing opposite to him , before an untidy stove , where the noon fire had died down into pallid , scattered ashes . Under his chin he held old Abel 's brown , battered fiddle ; his eyes , too , were fixed on the ceiling ; and he , too , saw things not lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music ; and of all music , only that given forth by the anguished , enraptured spirit of the violin . And yet this Felix was little more than twelve years old , and his face was still the face of a child who knows nothing of either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse . Only in his large , gray-black eyes was there something not of the child -- something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts , now ashes , which had aforetime grieved and joyed , and struggled and failed , and succeeded and grovelled .