e where
birds sang divinely, yet where obscene fowls of prey hovered in the
blue or waited by the dying denizens of the desert or the plain; where
dark-eyed women heard, with sidelong triumph, the whispers of passion;
where sweet-faced children fled in fear from terrors undefined; where
harpies and witch-women and evil souls waited in ambush; or scurried
through the coverts where men brought things to die; or where they fled
for futile refuge from armed foes. It was a world of unbridled will,
this, where the soul of Jethro Fawe had its origin; and to it his senses
fled involuntarily when he put Sarasate's fiddle to his chin this Autumn
evening.

From that well of the First Things--the first things of his own
life, the fount from which his forebears drew, backwards through the
centuries, Jethro Fawe quickly drank his fill; and then into the violin
he poured his own story--no improvisation, but musical legends and
classic fantasies and folk-breathings and histories of anguished or
joyous haters or lovers of life; treated by the impressionist who
made that which had been in other scenes to other men the thing of the
present and for the men who are. That which had happened by the Starzke
River was now of the Sagalac River. The passions and wild love and
irresponsible deeds of the life he had lived in years gone by were here.

It was impossible for Ingolby to resist the spell of the music. Such
abandonment he had never seen in any musician, such riot of musical
meaning he had never heard. He was conscious of the savagery and the
bestial soul of vengeance which spoke through the music, and drowned
the joy and radiance and almost ghostly and grotesque frivolity of the
earlier passages; but it had no personal meaning to him, though at times
it seemed when the Romany came near and bent over him with the ecstatic
attack of the music, as though there was a look in the black eyes like
that of a man who kills. It had, of course, nothing to do with him; it
was the abandonment of a highly emotional nature, he thought.

It was only after he had been playing, practically without ceasing,
for three-quarters of an hour, that there came to Ingolby the true
interpretation of the Romany mutterings through the man's white,
wolf-like teeth. He did not shrink, however, but kept his head and
watched.

Once, as the musician flung his body round in a sweep of passion,
Ingolby saw the black eyes flash to the weapons on the wall with a
malign l