She drew nearer, and saw a middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen
doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees.
She could tell little of his appearance, save that he had a fine
forehead, and hair that waved well back from it in rather an unusual
fashion. He was in his shirt-sleeves, but the gingham was
scrupulously clean, and he had the uncommon refinement of a collar
and necktie. Out of sight herself, Lyddy drew near enough to hear;
and this she did every night without recognising that the musician
was blind. The music had a curious effect upon her. It was a
hitherto unknown influence in her life, and it interpreted her, so to
speak, to herself. As she sat on the bed of brown pine needles,
under a friendly tree, her head resting against its trunk, her eyes
half closed, the tone of Anthony's violin came like a heavenly
message to a tired, despairing soul. Remember that in her secluded
existence she had heard only such harmony as Elvira Reynolds evoked
from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute, and the Reynolds
temperament was distinctly inartistic.
Lyddy lived through a lifetime of emotion in these twilight concerts.
Sometimes she was filled with an exquisite melancholy from which
there was no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain
stirred her heart with a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy
that she had never possessed, would never possess; joy whose bare
existence she never before realised.
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