player's obtrusive society, became by degrees to welcome and relax in it.
Fairthorn knew the great secrets of his life. To Fairthorn alone on all
earth could he speak with out reserve of one name and of one sorrow.
Speaking to Fairthorn was like talking to himself, or to his pointers, or
to his favourite doe, upon which last he bestowed a new collar, with an
inscription that implied more of the true cause that had driven him a
second time to the shades of Fawley than he would have let out to Alban
Morley or even to Lionel Haughton. Alban was too old for that confidence
--Lionel much too young. But the Musician, like Art itself, was of no
age; and if ever the gloomy master unbent his outward moodiness and
secret spleen in any approach to gaiety, it was in a sort of saturnine
playfulness to this grotesque, grown-up infant. They cheered each other,
and they teased each other. Stalking side by side over the ridged
fallows, Darrell would sometimes pour forth his whole soul, as a poet
does to his muse; and at Fairthorn's abrupt interruption or rejoinder,
turn round on him with fierce objurgation or withering sarcasm, or what
the flute-player abhorred more than all else, a truculent quotation from
Horace, which drove Fairthorn away into some vanishing covert or hollow,
out of which Darrell had to entice him, sure that, in return, Fairthorn
would take a sly occasion to send into his side a vindictive prickle.
But as the two came home in the starlight, the dogs dead beat and poor
Fairthorn too,--ten to one but what the musician was leaning all his
weight on his master's nervous arm, and Darrell was looking with tender
kindness in the face of the SOMEONE left to lean upon him still.

One evening, as they were sitting together in the library, the two
hermits, each in his corner, and after a long silence, the flute-player
said abruptly

"I have been thinking--"