--without recompense--"

"Mr. Keen!" said Burke, astonished.

"Yes?"

"You are very amiable; I had not wished--had not expected anything
except professional interest from you."

"Why not? I like you, Mr. Burke."

The utter disarming candor of this quiet, elderly gentleman silenced the
younger man with a suddenness born of emotions long crushed, long
relentlessly mastered, and which now, in revolt, shook him fiercely in
every fiber. All at once he felt very young, very helpless in the
world--that same world through which, until within a few weeks, he had
roved so confidently, so arrogantly, challenging man and the gods
themselves in the pride of his strength and youth.

But now, halting, bewildered, lost amid the strange maze of byways
whither impulse had lured and abandoned him, he looked out into a world
of wilderness and unfamiliar stars and shadow shapes undreamed of, and
he knew not which way to turn--not even how to return along the ways his
impetuous feet had trodden in this strange and hopeless quest of his.

"How can you help me?" he said bluntly, while the quivering undertone
rang in spite of him. "Yes, I am in love; but how can any living man
help me?"

"Are you in love with the dead?" asked the Tracer gravely. "For that
only is hopeless. Are you in love with one who is not living?"

"Yes."

"You love one whom you know to be dead?"

"Yes; dead."

"How do you know that she is dead?"

"That is not the question. I knew that when I fell in love with her. It
is not that which appals me; I ask nothing more than to live my life out
loving the dead. I--I ask very little."

He passed his unsteady hand across his dry lips, across his eyes and
forehead, then laid his clinched fist on the table.

"Some men remain constant to a memory; some to a picture--sane,
wholesome, normal men. Some men, with a fixed ideal, never encounter its
facsimile, and so never love. There is nothing strange, after all, in
this; nothing abnormal, nothing unwholesome. Gruenwald loved the marble
head and shoulders of the lovely Amazon in the Munich Museum; he died
unmarried, leaving the charities and good deeds of a blameless life to
justify him. Sir Henry Guest, the great surgeon who worked among the
poor without recompense, loved Gainsborough's 'Lady Wilton.' The
portrait hangs above his tomb in St. Clement's Hundreds. D'Epernay loved
Mlle. Jeanne Vacaresco, who died before he was born. And I--I love in
my own fashion."

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