"I am. I never met any one like him. He seems to be two men, or
several all rolled into one. You admire him, don't you?"
"Yes, tremendously, but he scares me a bit sometimes."
"Why?"
"I have wretched moments in which it seems that he is riding for a
fall. Things are going so fast, too fast sometimes--and besides, I'm
tired."
She glanced at him swiftly, but in the glance he caught nothing of what
he sought.
"If you're tired," she said slowly, "what about Mr. Clark? He's
carrying the whole thing, isn't he, as well as creating it? Is that
his piano in the blockhouse?"
The young man nodded.
"What does he play?"
"Nothing that I remember; he improvises. It rests him, I suppose."
"Has he many friends?"
"I don't know that he wants many."
"Then he sits there alone in the evenings and plays to himself,--I
wonder if it really is to himself? Don't you believe that somewhere
there must be some one he is playing to, and that it's for some one
he's doing all that's going on?" Elsie spoke a little breathlessly and
her eyes were luminous. "How old is he?"
"Perhaps between thirty-five and forty, I never asked--one doesn't ask
him that sort of thing. He never struck me as being of any particular
age."
"But you're going to follow him always, aren't you, and help to see him
through? He's following something too."
"What's that?" said Belding a little stiffly.
"His star." The girl's voice was very soft. "Perhaps he'll never
reach it, but that doesn't matter, if he follows it."
"Mr. Clark would differ with you there."
"Would he, I don't know. Perhaps I understand him better than you do."