“Well!” Sylvester sighed.  “Very few folks get me.  I’m kind of mis-understood.  I’m a real lonesome sort of man.  But, honest, Miss Sheila, I thought you were my friend.  I don’t mind telling you, you’ve hurt my feelings.  That shot kind of got me.  It’s stuck into me.”

“I’m horrid!” Sheila’s eyes were wounded with remorse.

“Oh, well, I’m not expecting understanding any more.”

“Oh, but I do—­I do understand!” she said eagerly and she put her hand shyly on his arm.  “I think I do understand you.  I’m very grateful.  I’m very fond of you.”

“Ah!” said Sylvester softly.  “That’s a good hearing!” He lifted his arm with Sheila’s hand on it and touched it with his lips.  “You got me plumb stirred up,” he said with a certain huskiness.  “Well!” She took away her hand and he made a great show of returning to common sense.  “I reckon we are a pretty good pair of friends, after all.  But you mustn’t be scared of me, Miss Sheila.  That does hurt.  Let’s forget you told me that.”

“Yes—­please!”

“Well, then—­to get back to business.  Do you recollect a story I told you?”

“A story?  Oh, yes—­about an Englishman—?”

“Yes, ma’am.  That Englishman put his foot on the rail and stuck his glass in his eye and set his tumbler down empty.  And he looked round that bar of mine, Miss Sheila.  You savvy, he’d been all over the globe, that feller, and I should say his ex-perience of bars was—­some—­and he said, ‘Hudson, it’s all but perfect.  It only needs one thing.’”

This time Sheila did not ask.  She waited.

“‘And that’s something we have in our country,’ said he.”  Hudson cleared his throat.  He also moistened his lips.  He was very apparently excited.  He leaned even farther forward, tilting on the front legs of his chair and thrusting his face close to Sheila’s “‘A pretty barmaid!’ said he.”

There was a profound silence in the small room.  The runners of a sleigh scraped the icy street below, its horses’ hoofs cracked noisily.  The music of a fiddle sounded in the distance.  Babe’s voice humming a waltz tune rose from the second story.

“A barmaid?” asked Sheila breathlessly.  She got up from her chair and walked over to the window.  The moon was already high.  Over there, beckoning, stood her mountain and her star.  It was all so shining and pure and still.

“That’s what you want me to be—­your barmaid?”

“Yes’m,” said Sylvester humbly.  “Don’t make up your mind in a hurry, Miss Sheila.  Wait till I tell you more about it.  It’s—­it’s a kind of dream of mine.  I think it’d come close to breaking me up if you turned down the proposition.  The Aura’s not an ordin-ar-y bar and I’m not an ordin-ar-y man, and, say, Miss Sheila, you’re not an ordin-ar-y girl.”

“Is that why you want me to work in your saloon?” said Sheila, staring at the star.