ntly, "if
something has troubled you, perhaps it will give you one relief to tell
me. Only yesterday Miss Iris was here. She was very sad when she came,
and when she went away the world was more sunny, or so I think."

Quickly surmising that Herr Kaufmann had something more than a hint of
it, and more eager for sympathy than he realised, Lynn stammered out the
story, choking at the end of it.

There was a long silence, in which the Master went back twenty-five
years. Lynn's eyes, so full of trouble, were they not like another's,
long ago? The organ-tone of the thunder once more reverberated through
the forest, where the great boughs arched like the nave of a cathedral,
and the dead leaves scurried in fright before the rising wind.

"That is all," said the boy, his face white to the lips. "It is not
much, but it is a great deal to me."

"So," said the Master, scornfully, "you are to be an artist and you are
afraid of life! You are summoned to the ranks of the great and you
shrink from the signal--cover your ears, that you shall not hear the
trumpet call! This, when you should be on your knees, thanking the good
God that at last He has taught you pain!"

Lynn's face was pitiful, and yet he listened eagerly.

"There is no half-way point," the Master was saying; "if you take it,
you must pay. Nothing in this world is free but the sun and the fresh
air. You must buy shelter, food, clothing, with the work of your hands
and brain. If someone else gives it to you, it is not yours--you are one
parasite. You must earn it all.

"You think you can take all, and give nothing? It is not so. For six,
eight years now, you study the violin. You learn the scales, the
technique, the good wrist, and nothing else. I teach you all I can, but
it must come from yourself, not me. I can only guide--tell you when you
have made one mistake.

"What is it that the art is for? Is it for one great assembly of people
to pay the high price for admission? 'See,' they say, 'this young man,
what good tone he has, what bowing, what fine wrist! How smooth he plays
his concerto! When it is marked fortissimo, see how he plays fortissimo!
It is most skilful!' Is the art for that? No!

"It is for everyone in the world who has known trouble to be lifted up
and made strong. They care nothing for the means, only for the end. They
have no eyes for the fine bowing, the good wrist--what shall they know
of technique? And yet you must have the technique, else