"I should like to learn," she said, wondering to hear him speak so
unreservedly. It seemed as if some vast barrier had been rolled aside,
and as if she were getting to know him better, having been allowed to
glance into his past life, to sympathise with his past mistakes, and
with the failure of his ambitions, and with the deadening of his heart.

"You must read AEschylus," he continued, enthusiastically; "and, if I
mistake not, the Agamemnon will be an epoch in your life. You will find
that all these studies will serve to ennoble your art, and you will be
able to put mind into your work, and not merely form and colour. Do
you know, I feel so well that I believe I shall not only live to finish
Andrea del Sarto, but also to smoke another pipe?"

"You have been too rash to-day," she laughed, "giving away your pipe and
pouch, your palette and brushes, in this reckless manner! I must get
you a new pipe to-morrow. I wonder you did not part with your venerable
Lucretius."

"That reminds me," he said, fumbling in his pocket; "I think I have
dropped my Lucretius. I fancy I left it somewhere in the Poets' Corner.
It would grieve me to lose that book."

"Let me go and look for it," she said, and she advanced a few steps, and
then came back to him.

"You have been saying many kind words to me," she said, as she put her
hand on his arm, "and I have not told you that I value your friendship,
and am grateful to you for letting me be more than a mere stranger
to you. I have been very lonely in my life, for I am not one to make
friends easily, and it has been a great privilege to me to talk with
you. I want you to know this: for if I have been anything to you, you
have been a great deal to me. I have never met with much sympathy from
those of my own age: I have found them narrow and unyielding, and they
found me dull and uninteresting. They had passed through few experiences
and knew nothing about failure or success, and some of them did not even
understand the earnestness of endeavour, and laughed at me when I spoke
of a high ideal. So I withdrew into myself, and should probably have
grown still more isolated than I was before, but that I met you, and, as
time went on, we became friends. I shall always remember your teaching,
and I will try to keep to a high ideal of life and art and endeavour,
and I will not let despair creep into my heart, and I will not lose my
faith in humanity."

As she spoke a lingering ray of sunshine