"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."