d talk a blue streak
to anyone, that girl could. I happened to say about something that it
didn't matter to a battered old hulk of sixty odd like me. She looked
at me with her big, innocent eyes, a little reproachful like, as if I'd
said something awful heretical. 'Don't you think, Mr. Blair,' she says,
'that the older we get the more things ought to matter to us?'--as grave
as if she'd been a hundred instead of eleven. 'Things matter SO much to
me now,' she says, clasping her hands thisaway, 'and I'm sure that when
I'm sixty they'll matter just five times as much to me.' Well, the
way she looked and the way she spoke made me feel downright ashamed of
myself because things had stopped mattering with me. But never mind all
that. My miserable old feelings don't count for much. What come of your
father's fiddle?"

"Grandfather took it away when I came here. I think he burned it. And I
long for it so often."

"Well, you've always got my old brown fiddle to come to when you must."

"Yes, I know. And I'm glad for that. But I'm hungry for a violin all the
time. And I only come here when the hunger gets too much to bear. I
feel as if I oughtn't to come even then--I'm always saying I won't do it
again, because I know grandfather wouldn't like it, if he knew."

"He has never forbidden it, has he?"

"No, but that is because he doesn't know I come here for that. He never
thinks of such a thing. I feel sure he WOULD forbid it, if he knew. And
that makes me very wretched. And yet I HAVE to come. Mr. Blair, do you
know why grandfather can't bear to have me play on the violin? He loves
music, and he doesn't mind my playing on the organ, if I don't neglect
other things. I can't understand it, can you?"

"I have a pretty good idea, but I can't tell you. It isn't my secret.
Maybe he'll tell you himself some day. But, mark you, young Felix, he
has got good reasons for it all. Knowing what I know, I can't blame him
over much, though I think he's mistaken. Come now, play something more
for me before you go--something that's bright and happy this time, so
as to leave me with a good taste in my mouth. That last thing you played
took me straight to heaven,--but heaven's awful near to hell, and at the
last you tipped me in."

"I don't understand you," said Felix, drawing his fine, narrow black
brows together in a perplexed frown.

"No--and I wouldn't want you to. You couldn't understand unless you was
an old man who had it in him once t