“Smoke, of course!” she managed to say.

She watched him closely, still alert, as he stuffed the tobacco into his pipe-bowl from a rubber pouch.  Then he struck the match and in that moment she suffered another shock.  The little flame danced out of the darkness, and wavering, upward shadows played over a face of utter quietness.  The relaxed shoulders drooped sideways in the chair, the body placidly sprawled, one crossed leg gently waving.  The shaded eye surveyed some large and tranquil thought—­and in that eye the soul sat remote, aloof from her as any star.

She sank back in her chair with a long, stealthy breath of relief—­a relief as cold as stone.  She had not felt before that there was a chill in the wide sweetness of the night.  Now it wrapped her round and slowly, with a soft brutality, penetrated to her heart.

The silence grew too long.  With a shrugging effort she surmounted herself and looked again toward the alien figure looming unconcerned in the gloom.  A warm, super-personal sense of friendliness came upon her.  Her intellect awoke to inquiries.  She began to question him of his days away, and soon he was talking freely enough, between pulls of his pipe.

“You know, Nance, I was a prodigal—­only when I awoke I had no father to go to.  Poor grandad!  What a brutal cub I was!  That has always stuck in my mind.  I was telling you about that cold wet night in Denver.  I had found a lodging in the police station.  There were others as forlorn—­and Nance—­did you ever realise the buoyancy of the human mind?  It’s sublime.  We rejected ones sat there, warming ourselves, chatting, and pretty soon one man found there were thirteen of us.  You would have thought that none of them could fear bad luck—­worse luck—­none of them could have been more dismally situated.  But, do you know? most of those fellows became nervous—­as apprehensive of bad luck as if they had been pampered princes in a time of revolution.  I was one of the two that volunteered to restore confidence by bringing in another man.

“We found an undersized, insignificant-looking chap toddling aimlessly along the street a few blocks away from the station.  We grappled with him and hustled him back to the crowd.  He slept with us on the floor, and no one paid any further attention to him, except to remark that he talked to himself a good bit.  He and I awoke earliest next morning.  I asked him if he was hungry and he said he was.  So I bought two fair breakfasts with the money I’d saved for one good one, and we started out of town.  This chap said he was going that way, and I had made up my mind to find a certain friend of mine—­a chap named Hoover.  The second day out I discovered that this queer man was the one who’d been turning Denver upside down for ten days, healing the halt and the blind.  He was running away because he liked a quieter life.”

He stopped, laughing softly, as if in remembrance—­until she prompted him.