Usually one of two fates overtakes the obscure professional scholar in this country:  either he shrinks to the dimensions of a true villager and deserts the vastness of his library; or he repudiates the village and becomes a cosmopolitan recluse—­lonely toiler among his books.  Few possess the breadth and equipoise which will enable them to pass from day to day along mental paths, which have the Forum of Augustus or the Groves of the Academy at one end and the babbling square of a modern town at the other; remaining equally at home amid ancient ideals and everyday realities.

It was the fate of the recluse that threatened him.  He had been born with the scholar’s temperament—­this furnished the direction; before he had reached the age of twenty-five he had lost his wife and two sons—­that furrowed the tendency.  During the years immediately following he had tried to fill an immense void of the heart with immense labors of the intellect.  The void remained; yet undoubtedly compensation for loneliness had been found in the fixing of his affections upon what can never die—­the inexhaustible delight of learning.

Thus the life of the book-worm awaited him but for an interference excellent and salutary and irresistible.  This was the constant companionship of a sister whose nature enabled her to find its complete universe in the only world that she had ever known:  she walking ever broad-minded through the narrowness of her little town; remaining white though often threading its soiling ways; and from every life which touched hers, however crippled and confined, extracting its significance instead of its insignificance, shy harmonies instead of the easy discords which can so palpably be struck by any passing hand.

It was due to her influence, therefore, that his life achieved the twofold development which left him normal in the middle years; the fresh pursuing scholar still but a man practically welded to the people among whom he lived—­receiving their best and giving his best.

But we cannot send our hearts out to play at large among our kind, without their coming to choose sooner or later playfellows to be loved more than the rest.

Two intimacies entered into the life of Professor Hardage.  The first of these had been formed many years before with Judge Ravenel Morris.  They had discovered each other by drifting as lonely men do in the world; each being without family ties, each loving literature, each having empty hours.  The bond between them had strengthened, until it had become to each a bond of strength indeed, mighty and uplifting.

The other intimacy was one of those for which human speech will never, perhaps, be called upon to body forth its describing word.  In the psychology of feeling there are states which we gladly choose to leave unlanguaged.  Vast and deep-sounding as is the orchestra of words, there are scores which we never fling upon such instruments—­realities that lie outside the possibility and the desirability of utterance as there are rays of the sun that fall outside the visible spectrum of solar light.