, thought so.

He was a slight lad, with sloping shoulders, a slim brown neck, and a
head set on it with stag-like grace and uplift. His hair, cut straight
across his brow and falling over his ears, after some caprice of Janet
Andrews, the minister's housekeeper, was a glossy blue-black. The
skin of his face and hands was like ivory; his eyes were large and
beautifully tinted--gray, with dilating pupils; his features had the
outlines of a cameo. Carmody mothers considered him delicate, and had
long foretold that the minister would never bring him up; but old Abel
pulled his grizzled moustache when he heard such forebodings and smiled.

"Felix Moore will live," he said positively. "You can't kill that kind
until their work is done. He's got a work to do--if the minister'll let
him do it. And if the minister don't let him do it, then I wouldn't be
in that minister's shoes when he comes to the judgment--no, I'd rather
be in my own. It's an awful thing to cross the purposes of the Almighty,
either in your own life or anybody else's. Sometimes I think it's what's
meant by the unpardonable sin--ay, that I do!"

Carmody people never asked what old Abel meant. They had long ago given
up such vain questioning. When a man had lived as old Abel had lived for
the greater part of his life, was it any wonder he said crazy things?
And as for hinting that Mr. Leonard, a man who was really almost
too good to live, was guilty of any sin, much less an unpardonable
one--well, there now! what use was it to be taking any account of old
Abel's queer speeches? Though, to be sure, there was no great harm in
a fiddle, and maybe Mr. Leonard was a mite too strict that way with the
child. But then, could you wonder at it? There was his father, you see.

Felix finally lowered the violin, and came back to old Abel's kitchen
with a long sigh. Old Abel smiled drearily at him--the smile of a man
who has been in the hands of the tormentors.

"It's awful the way you play--it's awful," he said with a shudder. "I
never heard anything like it--and you that never had any teaching since
you were nine years old, and not much practice, except what you could
get here now and then on my old, battered fiddle. And to think you make
it up yourself as you go along! I suppose your grandfather would never
hear to your studying music--would he now?"

Felix shook his head.

"I know he wouldn't, Abel. He wants me to be a minister. Ministers are
good things to be, bu