`` I am going to stay in Spencervale for a whole year yet , just to be near you . And next year when I go to Europe -- thanks to you , fairy godmother -- I 'll write you every day . We are going to be the best of chums , and we are going to have a most beautiful year of comradeship ! '' The Old Lady smiled contentedly . Out in the kitchen , the minister 's wife , who had brought up a dish of jelly , was talking to Mrs. Spencer about the Sewing Circle . Through the open window , where the red vines hung , came the pungent , sun-warm October air . The sunshine fell over Sylvia 's chestnut hair like a crown of glory and youth . `` I do feel so perfectly happy , '' said the Old Lady , with a long , rapturous breath . III . Each In His Own Tongue The honey-tinted autumn sunshine was falling thickly over the crimson and amber maples around old Abel Blair 's door . There was only one outer door in old Abel 's house , and it almost always stood wide open . A little black dog , with one ear missing and a lame forepaw , almost always slept on the worn red sandstone slab which served old Abel for a doorstep ; and on the still more worn sill above it a large gray cat almost always slept . Just inside the door , on a bandy-legged chair of elder days , old Abel almost always sat . He was sitting there this afternoon -- a little old man , sadly twisted with rheumatism ; his head was abnormally large , thatched with long , wiry black hair ; his face was heavily lined and swarthily sunburned ; his eyes were deep-set and black , with occasional peculiar golden flashes in them . A strange looking man was old Abel Blair ; and as strange was he as he looked . Lower Carmody people would have told you . Old Abel was almost always sober in these , his later years . He was sober to-day . He liked to bask in that ripe sunlight as well as his dog and cat did ; and in such baskings he almost always looked out of his doorway at the far , fine blue sky over the tops of the crowding maples . But to-day he was not looking at the sky , instead , he was staring at the black , dusty rafters of his kitchen , where hung dried meats and strings of onions and bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins .
But old Abel saw not these things ; his face was the face of a man who beholds visions , compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain , for old Abel was seeing what he might have been -- and what he was ; as he always saw when Felix Moore played XXXXX him on the violin .
Through around as for in like of on to with