“Tell me why it is that you live so much alone,” said the girl.  “Is it that you do not care for friends?”

“It is very difficult for a man who feels about life as I do to find many friends,” he responded.  “If one strives to dwell in deep things, and is very keen and earnest about it, he is apt to find very little to help him outside of himself; perhaps it is because I have met very few persons in my life, but it has not happened to me to find anyone who thinks about it as I do, or who cares to live it with my strenuousness.  I have met musicians, some who labored very hard at their art, but none who felt it a duty to labor with their own souls, to make them beautiful and strong; and I have met literary men and scholars, but they were all interested in books, and were willing to be learned, and to classify and plod; I have never found one who was swift and eager, and full of high impatience for what is real and the best.  There should come times to a man, I think, when he feels that books are an impertinence, when he knows that he has only the long-delayed battle with his own heart to fight, and the prize of its joy to win.  When such moods come upon him he sees that he has to live his life upon his knees, and it is rarely indeed that he knows of anyone who can follow him and share in his labor.  So it is that I have had to live all my life by myself, Miss Davis.”

“You have always done that?” Helen asked, as he stopped.

“Yes,” he answered, “or for very many years.  I have a little house on the wildest of lakes up in the mountains, wyhere I play the hermit in the summer, and where I should have been now if it had not been that I yielded to your aunt’s invitation.  When I spoke of having no friends I forgot the things of Nature, which really do sympathize with an artist’s life; I find that they never fail to become full of meaning whenever my own spirit shakes off its bonds.  It has always been a belief of mine that there is nothing that Nature makes that is quite so dull and unfeeling as man,—­with the exception of children and lovers, I had much rather play my violin for the flowers and the trees.”

“You like to play it out of doors?” Helen asked, with a sudden smile.

“Yes,” laughed the other, “that is one of my privileges as a hermit.  It seems quite natural to the wild things, for they have all a music of their own, a wonderful, silent music that the best musicians cannot catch; do you not believe that, Miss Davis?”

“Yes,” Helen said, and sat gazing at her companion silently for a minute.  “I should think a life of such effort would be very hard,” she said finally.  “Do you not ever fail?”

“I do not do much else,” he replied with a sad smile, “and get up and stumble on.  The mastership of one’s heart is the ideal, you know; and after all one’s own life cannot be anything but struggle and failure, for the power he is trying to conquer is infinite.  When I find my life very hard I do not complain, but know that the reason for it is that I have chosen to have it real, and that the essence of the soul is its effort.  I think that is a very important thing to feel about life, Miss Davis.”