“‘No,’ I answer; ‘but because I’m blameless shall I become inhuman, and close my heart to all display of tenderness and pain?’
“And there we have it, miss, over and over again. Ah, I am afraid we shall never agree!”
“It is lamentable,” Agnes agreed, believing that the young man’s life in the solitudes had unsettled his mind. “I never agree with him on that myself.”
The philosopher’s hollow, weathered face glowed as she gave this testimony. He drew a little nearer to her, shaking the long, dark, loose hair back from his forehead.
“I am glad that you don’t think me demented,” said he. “Many, who do not understand the deeper feelings of the soul, do believe it. The hollow-minded and the unstable commonly lose their small balance of reason in these hills, miss, with no companionship, month in and month out, but a dog and the poor, foolish creatures which you see in the valley yonder. But to one who is a philosopher, and a student of the higher things, this situation offers room for the expansion of 238 the soul. Mine has gone forth and enlarged here; it has filled the universe.”
“But a man of your education and capabilities,” she suggested, thinking to humor him, “ought to be more congenially situated, it seems to me. There must be more remunerative pursuits which you could follow?”
“Remuneration for one may not be reward for another,” he told her. “I shall remain here until my mission is accomplished.”
He turned to his flock, and, with a motion of the arm, sped his dog to fetch in some stragglers which seemed straying off waywardly over the crest of the opposite hill. As he stood so she marked his ascetic gauntness, and noted that the hand which swung at his side twitched and clenched, and that the muscles of his cleanly shaved jaws swelled as he locked his teeth in determination.
“Your mission?” she asked, curious regarding what it might be, there in the solitude of those barren hills.
“I see that you are armed,” he observed irrelevantly, as if the subject of his mission had been put aside. “I have a very modern weapon of that pattern in the wagon, but there is little call for the use of it here. Perhaps you live in the midst of greater dangers than I?”