“All the same I’ve had a hard life,” she returned with passionate earnestness.  “I married when I was twenty, and seven years later my husband left me for another woman.”

“The one in there?”

She shuddered, “Yes, the one in there.”

“The darn fool!” he exclaimed briefly.

“There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support and educate.  Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I turned to that, and in the end I succeeded.  But for ten years I never heard a word of the man I married—­until—­I met him downstairs—­in the street.”

“And you brought him in?”

“What else could I do?  He was dying.”

“Do you know what he was doing out there?”

“He was looking for me, I think.  He thought.  I would take him in.”

“Well, it’s strange how things work out,” was his comment after a pause.  “There’s something in it somewhere that we can’t see.  It’s impossible to reason it out or explain it, but life has a way of jerking you up at times and making you stand still and think.  I know I’m putting it badly, but I can’t talk—­I never could.  Words, don’t mean much to me, and yet I know—­I know—­” He hesitated, and she watched his thought struggle obscurely for expression.  “I know you can’t slip away from things and be a quitter, no matter how hard you try.  Life pulls you back again and again till you’ve learned to play the game squarely.”

He was gazing into the fire with a look that was strangely spiritual on his face, which was half in shadow, half in the transfiguring glow of the flames.  For the second time she became acutely aware of the hidden subtleties beneath his apparent simplicity.

“I’ve felt that myself often enough,” he resumed presently in a low voice.  “I’ve been pulled up by something inside of me when I was plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it’s been just exactly as if this something said:  ’Go steady or you’ll run amuck and bu’st up the whole blooming show.’  You can’t talk about it.  It sounds like plain foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no matter where you are, you have to stand still and listen.”

“And is it only when you are running amuck that you hear it?” she asked.

“No, there’ve been other times—­a few of them.  Once or twice I’ve had it come to me up in the Rockies when there didn’t seem more than a few feet between me and the sky, and then there was a time out on the prairie when I was lost and thought I’d never get to the end of those darned miles of blankness.  Well, I’ve had a funny road to travel when I look back at it.”

“Tell me about some of the women you knew in the West.”  An insatiable curiosity to hear the truth about his marriage seized her; but no sooner had she yielded to it than she felt an impulsive regret.  What right had she to pry into the hidden sanctities of his past?

A frown contracted his forehead, but he said merely:  “Oh, there wasn’t much about that,” and she felt curiously baffled and resentful.  “I think I’ll go and take a look in there,” he added, rising and walking softly in the direction of the room at the end of the hall.