SON OF THE WIND
gether, their harmonies and elations, the scholar might have perceived, as the ear takes in the rhythm of words, pleased, without reflection or deduction. It was of the other thing he questioned, which had brought the two men together, and which, strangely enough, still seemed a living issue in Rader's mind. The younger man looked it down. He would not acknowledge that such a thing existed, or ever had existed. He thought the scholar looked both relieved and disappointed. No doubt his imagination had been strongly touched; he had thought to see some incident, like an old, heroic tale, played out before his eyes.
But there, also, was his loyalty to the girl. She seemed to stand for a great deal to him, perhaps for an embodiment of that theoretic beauty he had named once as being the most real thing in all the world; perhaps for the embodiment of a simpler, more human thing, his own youth. There was a likeness between them. Even Carron, an observer, could trace the outward resemblance, the same quick, inquiring turn of the head, and the same dreamy eye, though it dreamed upon a different ideal, the scholar's was upon the abstract; the girl's upon the concrete—a terrible thing to desire and to expect to find. She watched her father's face more than she did the beautiful pages of his Spectators.
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