He was mollified by the praise he had received.
He raised the fiddle slowly to his chin, his eyes wandering round the room, then projecting themselves into space, from which they only returned to fix themselves on Ingolby with the veiled look which sees but does not see--such a look as an oracle, or a death-god, or a soulless monster of some between-world, half-Pagan god would wear.

Just such a look as Watts's "Minotaur" wears in the Tate Gallery in London.
In an instant he was away in a world which was as far off from this world as Jupiter is from Mars.

It was the world of his soul's origin--a place of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts.

It was a place 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.