Mary; Mary!  He kept saying her name over and over to himself, sometimes aloud, in a passion of reproach, sometimes softly, broodingly, with love and pathos unutterable.  What power there was in that wicked voice!  He had never rightly heard it before, never, save that instant when she stood playing in the village street, and he saw her for a moment and loved her forever.  Oh, he had heard, to be sure, this or that strolling fiddler,—­godless, tippling wretches, who rarely came to the village, and never set foot there twice, he thought with pride.  But this, this was different!  What power! what sweetness, filling his heart with rapture even while his spirit cried out against it!  What voices, entreating, commanding, uplifting!

Nay, what was he saying? and who did not know that Satan could put on an angel’s look when it pleased him? and if a look, why not a voice?  When had a fiddle played godly tunes, chant or psalm? when did it do aught else but tempt the foolish to their folly, the wicked to their iniquity?

Mary!  Mary!  How lovely she was, in the faint gleams of light that fell about her, there in the dim old attic!  He felt her beauty, almost, more than he saw it.  And all this year, while he had thought her growing in grace, silently, indeed, but he hoped truly, she had been hankering for the forbidden thing, had been planning deceit in her heart, and had led away the innocent child to follow unrighteousness with her.  He would go back, and do what he should have done a year ago,—­what he would have done, had he not yielded to the foolish talk of a foolish woman.  He would go back, and burn the fiddle, and silence forever that sweet, insidious music, with its wicked murmurs that stole into a man’s heart—­even a man’s, and one who knew the evil, and abhorred it.  The smoke of it once gone up to heaven, there would be an end.  He should have his wife again, his own, and nothing should come between them more.  Yes, he would go back, in a little while, as soon as those sounds had died away from his ears.  What was the song she sung there?

  “’Tis long and long I have loved thee! 
  I’ll ne’er forget thee more.”

She would forget it, though, surely, surely, when it was gone, breathed out in flame and ashes:  when he could say to her, “There is no more any such thing in my house and yours, Mary, Mary.”

How tenderly he would tell her, though!  It would hurt, yes! but not so much as her look would hurt him when he told her.  Ah, she loved the wooden thing best!  He was dumb, and it spoke to her in a thousand tones!  Even he had understood some of them.  There was one note that was like his mother’s voice when she lifted it up in the hymn she loved best,—­his gentle mother, dead so long, so long ago.  She—­why, she loved music; he had forgotten that.  But only psalms, only godly hymns, never anything else.

What devil whispered in his ear, “She never heard anything else.  She would have loved this too, this too, if she had had the chance, if she had heard Mary play!” He put his hands to his ears, and almost ran on.  Where was he going?  He did not ask, did not think.  He only knew that it was a relief to be walking, to get farther and farther away from what he loved and fain would cherish, from what he hated and would fain destroy.