Her eyes shone with quick understanding.  “Of course,” she agreed, “you couldn’t be that kind of a man, and love the music, and like to be here among the roses or up in the mountains, could you?”

“No, and I’ll tell you something else that goes with our secret.  Your name is not really Sibyl Andres, you know—­any more than you really live over there in that little house.  Your real home is in the mountains—­just as you said—­you really live among the glowing peaks, under the dark pines, on the ridges, and in the purple shadows of the canyons.  You only come down here to the Fairlands folk with a message from your mountains—­and we call your message music.  Your name is—­”

She was leaning forward, her face glowing with eagerness.  “What is my name?”

“What can it be but ’Nature’,” he said softly.  “That’s it, ’Nature’.”

“And you?  Who are you when you are not—­when you are not in that other world?”

“Me?  Oh, my real name is ‘Civilization’.  Can’t you guess why?”

She shook her head.  “Tell me.”

“Because,—­in spite of all that the world that reads my books can give,—­poor old ‘Civilization’ cannot be happy without the message that ‘Nature’ brings from her mountains.”

“And you, too, love the mountains and—­and this garden, and my music?” she asked half doubtingly.  “You are not pretending that too—­just to amuse me?”

“No, I am not pretending that,” he said.

“Then why—­how can you do the—­the other thing?  I can’t understand.”

“Of course, you can’t understand—­how could you?  You are ‘Nature’ and ‘Nature’ must often be puzzled by the things that ‘Civilization’ does.”

“Yes.  I think that is true,” she agreed.  “But I’m glad you like my music, anyway.”

“And so am I glad—­that I can like it.  That’s the only thing that saves me.”

“And your friend, the artist,—­does he like my mountain music, do you think?”

“Very much.  He needs it too.”

“I am glad,” she answered simply.  “I hoped he would like it, and that it would help him.  It was really for him that I have played.”

“You played for him?”

“Yes,” she returned without confusion.  “You see, I did not know about you—­then.  I thought you were altogether the man who wrote those books—­and so I could not play for you.  That is—­I mean—­you understand—­I could not play—­” again she seemed to search for a word, and finding it, smiled—­“I could not play myself for you.  But I thought that because he was an artist he would understand; and that if I could make the music tell him of the mountains it would, perhaps, help him a little to make his work beautiful and right—­do you see?”

“Yes,” he answered smilingly, “I see.  I might have known that it was for him that you brought your message from the hills.  But poor old ‘Civilization’ is frightfully stupid sometimes, you know.”