“Are you sure of that?” Ford looked up from under lowering eyebrows.

“Unh-hunh—­that’s what you done, all right.”  Sandy’s voice was dishearteningly positive.

“Lordy me!” gasped Ford under his breath.

There was a silence which slid Sandy’s interest back into his book.  He turned a leaf and was half-way down the page before he was interrupted by more questions.

“Say!  Where’s she at now?” Ford spoke with a certain furtive lowering of his voice.

“I d’ know.”  Sandy read a line with greedy interest.  “She took the ’leven-twenty,” he added then.  Another mental lapse.  “You seen her to the train yourself.”

“The hell I did!” Ford’s good eye glared incredulity, but Sandy was again following hungrily the love-tangle of an unpronounceable count in the depths of the Black Forest, and he remained perfectly unconscious of the look and the mental distress which caused it.  Ford went back to studying the meager blaze and trying to remember.  He might be able to extract the whole truth from Sandy, but that would involve taking his novel away from him—­by force, probably; and the loss of the book would be very likely to turn Sandy so sullen that he would refuse to answer, or to tell the truth, at any rate; and Ford’s muscles were very, very sore.  He did not feel equal to a scuffle with Sandy, just then.  He repeated something which sounded like an impromptu litany and had to do with the ultimate disposal of his own soul.

“Hunh?” asked Sandy.

Whereupon Ford, being harassed mentally and in great physical discomfort as well, specifically disposed of Sandy’s immortal soul also.

Sandy merely grinned at him.  “You don’t want to take it to heart like that,” he remonstrated cheerfully.

Ford, by way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of Sandy’s immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic adjectives.  He waded through the first paragraph and well into the second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar polysyllables.  Sandy was not the skipping kind; he threw the book upon a bench and gave his attention wholly to his companion in time to save his great-grandfather from utter condemnation.

“What’s eating you, Ford?” he began pacifically—­for Sandy was a weakling.  “You might be a lot worse off.  You’re married, all right enough, from all I c’n hear—­but she’s left town.  It ain’t as if you had to live with her.”

Ford looked at him a minute and groaned dismally.

“Oh, I ain’t meaning anything against the lady herself,” Sandy hastened to assure him.  “Far as I know, she’s all right—­”

“What I want to know,” Ford broke in, impatient of condolence when he needed facts, “is, who is she?  And what did I go and marry her for?”