noon
_ '' The applause did not wait for the orchestra to slide comfortably back to the tonic . It broke out promptly upon the final note , and it satisfied even Bobby . Thayer bowed his acknowledgments , and then returned to his reverie ; but he roused himself again at the _ Adagio _ which announced his second aria . Then it was , in Paul 's outcry for mercy , for the blotting out of his transgressions , that Bobby Dane understood what Thayer had meant , that noon , when he had spoken of being carried along by something outside of himself . Bobby knew Thayer as a quiet , self-contained man of the world ; the Thayer who was singing that great aria was on fire with a passionate madness , tingling with unfulfilled longing , striving against his whole temperament for peace and for pardon . Bobby knew all this ; he dimly realized , moreover , that the singer was fired by love for the wife of his friend , burning with the surety that his friend was unworthy of her , and struggling with all the manhood there was in him to face that love and that surety with the stoic calm of one of his Puritan ancestors , to quench the fire and to cover the ashes . Bobby joined him in the wings , at the close of the concert .