These moderate, chastened words restored the boy’s confidence and completely captured his friendship.  Now he felt sure of his comrade, and he put to him a more searching question: 

“Do you know anything about the cathedral?”

The man smiled guiltily.

“A little.  I know a little about the cathedral,” he admitted.

There was a moment of tense, anxious silence.  And now the whole secret came out: 

“Do you know how boys get into the cathedral choir school?”

The man did not answer.  He stood looking down at the lad, in whose eyes all at once a great baffled desire told its story.  Then he pulled out his watch and merely said: 

“I must be going.  Good morning.”  He turned his way across the rock.

Disappointment darkened the lad’s face when he saw that he was to receive no answer; withering blight dried up its joy.  But he recovered himself quickly.

“Well, I must be going, too,” he said bravely and sweetly.  “Good morning.”  He turned his way across the rock.  But he had had a good time talking with this stranger, and, after all, he was a Southerner; and so, as his head was about to disappear below the cliff, he called back in his frank human gallant way: 

“I’m glad I met you, Mister.”

The man went up and the boy went down.

The man, having climbed to the parapet, leaned over the stone wall.  The tops of some of the tall poplar-trees, rooted far below, were on a level with his eyes.  Often he stopped there to watch them swaying like upright plumes against the wind.  They swayed now in the silvery April air with a ripple of silvery leaves.  His eyes sought out intimately the barely swollen buds on the boughs of other forest trees yet far from leaf.  They lingered on the white blossoms of the various shrubs.  They found the pink hawthorn; in the boughs of one of those trees one night in England in mid-May he had heard the nightingale, master singer of the non-human world.  Up to him rose the enchanting hillside picture of grass and moss and fern.  It was all like a sheet of soft organ music to his nature-reading eyes.

While he gazed, he listened.  Down past the shadows and the greenness, through the blossoms and the light, growing fainter and fainter, went a wandering little drift of melody, a haunting, unidentified sound under the blue cathedral dome of the sky.  He reflected again that he had never heard anything like it.  It was, in truth, a singing soul.

Then he saw the lad’s sturdy figure bound across the valley to join friends in play on the thoroughfare that skirts the park alongside the row of houses.

He himself turned and went in the direction of the cathedral.

As he walked slowly along, one thing haunted him remorsefully—­the upturned face of the lad and the look in his eyes as he asked the question which brought out the secret desire of a life:  “Do you know how boys get into the cathedral choir school?” Then the blight of disappointment when there was no answer.