"Yes," said Evelina, happily, "you called me, and I came."
"Spinner in the Sun," said the Piper, tenderly, "have you guessed my work?"
"Why, keeping the shop, isn't it?" asked Evelina, wonderingly; "the needles and thread and pins and buttons and all the little trifles that women need? A pedler's pack, set up in a house?"
The Piper laughed. "No," he replied, "I'm thinking that is not my work, nor yet the music that has no tune, which I'm for ever playing on my flute. Lady, I have travelled far, and seen much, and always there has been one thing that is strangest of all. In every place that I have been in yet, there has been a church and a minister, whose business was to watch over human souls.
"He's told them what was right according to his own thinking, which I'm far from saying isn't true for him, and never minded anything more. In spite of blood and tears and agony, he's always held up the one standard, and, I'm thinking, has always pointed to the hardest way to reach it. The way has been so hard that many have never reached it at all, and those who have--I've not seen that they are the happiest or the kindest, nor that they are loved the most.
"In the same place, too, there is always a doctor, whose business it is to watch over the body. If you have a broken leg or a broken arm, or a fever, he can set you right again. Blind eyes can be made to see, and deaf ears made to hear, but, Lady, who is there to care about a broken heart?
"I have taken in my pedler's pack the things that women need, because 't is women, mostly, who bear the heartaches of the world, and I come closer to them so. What you say I have done for you, I have done for many more. I'm trying to make the world a bit easier for all women because a woman gave me life. And because I love another woman in another way," he added, his voice breaking, "I'll be trudging on to-morrow alone, though 't would be easier, I'm thinking, to linger here."
Evelina's heart leaped with a throb of the old pain. "Tell me about her," she said, because it seemed the only thing to say.
"The woman I love," answered the Piper, "is not for me. She'd never be thinking of stooping to such as I, and I'd not be insulting her by asking. She's very proud, but she could be tender if she chose, and she's the bravest soul I ever knew--so brave that she fears neither death nor life, though life itself has not been kind.