"Oh, and this is finest of all," said Hugh John, hurrying on, "but don't tell any one. I make you a partner of my solitude. It lasts just a little while. It is selfish, if you like, but sometimes it is good to live alone! Do you know what Senancour says love is?"
"No!" I gasped, "how should I know?"
And in truth I was more surprised that already Hugh John should be thinking of such things. But when I told father, he just said to let him alone—that the boy was finding his soul.
Perhaps it might be in this old, sad, hundred-year-old book that he was to find it. For the soul, father says, is just the capacity a man has of thinking for himself.
But Hugh John went on joyously, with his firm, pale, clean-cut face looking out of the Cave's mouth towards the distant sapphire band of the Firth, with the three Lomonds in a paler row of blue mounds behind.
"'Often on the breast of some mountain, when the winds, sweeping down from their wild "hopes" and gorges, ruffle the little high-lying solitary lakes, the eternal clatter of the waves, heard only by myself, makes me feel the instability of things, and the eternal reconstruction of the earth out of her own débris.
"'Thus giving myself up to the influence of all about me, bending to the stoop of the bird which passes above me, thrilled by the falling stone, conferring only with the moaning of the wind, watching the oncoming mist, I become a part of the Peace of Things which is God. All reposes, yet all is in motion, and I become part of it—calm as that higher serenity, cool as that shadow—the hum of an insect or the scent of a trampled herb making my communion with Nature. I also am of the great sweet earth. I live its life, and in time I shall die its death.'"
Now, for myself, I did not think that this was the sort of thing a boy ought to be thinking of at Hugh John's age. But, since father said he too had "passed that way," and since Hugh John could eat, sleep, run, and play as well as anybody, I did not say anything.
But I foresaw a day of reckoning—yes, I—because I am older, and a girl. And in the world there are other girls. One day Hugh John (or I am greatly mistaken) will turn the leaves of another book, and then Senancour the austere will be forgotten, passed by on his shelf like a chance acquaintance whose very name has become strange.
Perhaps I wrong him. But this is what I think. At any rate I resolved to try and guide his thoughts into more cheerful paths (it is a pity we have not Senancour's pretty word 'sentier'; I have always loved it).