ations out for the wedding, and then--one night she overheard a
conversation between him and a cousin of his, who was to be one of her
bridesmaids. Only a few words--but they told everything. It was the
other girl he loved, and had always loved. But he was poor, and
so--well, you can guess the rest. My sister broke off her engagement
the next day, though the man went on his knees to her, and vowed he
had been mad. Then she left home at once, and soon she was taken very
ill."

"She loved that worthless scoundrel so much?"

"I don't know. I don't think she knows. It was the destruction of an
ideal which was terrible. She had clung to it. She had said to
herself: 'Many men may be false, and mercenary, and unscrupulous, but
this one is true.' Suddenly, he had ceased to exist for her. She stood
alone in the world--in the dark."

"Except for you."

"Except for me, and a few friends,--one girl especially, who was
heavenly to her. But the dearest girl friend can't make up for the
loss of trust in a lover."

"That's true. By Jove, I thought I had been roughly used, but it's
nothing to this. I feel as if I knew your sister, somehow. I wonder,
since you and she are such pals, that you can bear to leave her."

"She wanted to be alone. She said she didn't feel at home in life any
more, and it made her restless to be with anyone who knew her trouble,
anyone who pitied her. I was ill too,--from sympathy, I suppose,
and--she thought a tramp like this would do me good. So it has. Being
close to nature, especially among mountains, as I've been for weeks
now, makes one's troubles and even one's sister's troubles seem
small."

"You are young to feel that."

"My soul isn't as young as my body. Maybe that's why nature is so much
to me. I am more alive when I'm away from big towns. Sunrises and
sunsets are more important than the rising and falling of money
markets. They--and the wind in the trees. What things they say to you!
You can't explain; you can only feel. And when you _have_ felt, when
you have heard colour, and seen sounds, you are never quite the same,
quite as sad, again,--I mean if you _have_ been sad."

"I've said all that--precisely that--to myself lately," I exclaimed,
forgetting that I was a man talking to a child. The strange little
person whom I had apostrophised as "Brat" seemed not only an equal,
but a superior. I found myself intensely interested in him, and all
that concerned him. "Odd, that you, too, should