"Yes, as a boy loves; without thought--crazily--only that one idea in his mind; ready to die for her; no sleep; sometimes a whole day without tasting a mouthful; floating on soap-bubbles. Ah! we never love that way but once. It was all burned out of me though, that summer. I've just lived on ever since--painting a little, nursing these old logs, hobnobbing with you boys; getting older--most forty now--getting poorer." "And did she love you, Mac?" "Yes, same way. Only she got over it and I didn't." "Some other fellow?" "No, her father. Oh, there's no use going into it! But sometimes when I do my level best and put my heart into a thing, as I have done into that picture at the Academy, or as I poured it out to that girl in that old garden at Lucerne, and it all comes to naught, I lose my grip for a time and feel like putting my foot through my canvases and hiring out somewhere for a dollar a day." I made no comment. My long years of intimacy with my friend had taught me never to interrupt him when he was in one of these moods, and never to ask him any question outside the trend of his thoughts. "Self-made, dominating man, her father; began life as a brass-moulder. 'Worked with my hands, sir,' he would tell me, holding out his stubs of fingers. Didn't want any loafers and spongers around him. He didn't say that to me, of course, but he did to her. The mother was different, like the daughter; she believed in me. She believed in anything Nell liked. Behind in her music--that's what she came to Munich for; and when she wanted to paint, hunted me up to teach her. She was eighteen and I was twenty-three. Well, you can fill in the rest. Every day, you know; sometimes at my hole in the wall, sometimes at her apartment. Went on all winter. In May he came over and wired them to meet him in Lucerne. We tried parting; sat up half the night, we three, talking it over--the dear mother helping. She loved us both by that time! I tried it for two days and then locked up my place and started. That old garden was where we met and where we continued to meet. He came down one morning to see what we were doing; we were doing that sketch--had been doing it for two weeks. Some days it got a brushful of paint and some days it didn't. You know how hard you would work when the girl you loved best in the world sat beside you looking up into your face. Sometimes the dear mother would be with us, and sometimes she would make believe she was. In the intervals she was working on the old gentleman, trying to break it to him easy. 'You have worked all your life,' she would say to him, 'and you have, outside of me, only two things left--your money and your daughter. The money won't make her happy unless there is somebody to share it with her. This boy loves her; he is clean'--I'm just quoting her words, old man; I was in those days--'honest, has an honorable profession, and will succeed the better once he has Nellie to help him