“Tommy might give you a few pointers on game,” Carr remarked at last.  “He has the sporting instinct.  It hasn’t become a commonplace routine with him yet, a matter of getting meat, as it has to the rest of us up here.”

Ashe made his first vocal contribution.

“If you’re going to be about here for awhile,” said he pleasantly, “you’ll find it interesting to dodge about after things in the woods with a gun.  Keeps you fit, for one thing.  Lots of company in a dog and a gun.  Is it a permanent undertaking, this missionary work of yours, Mr. Thompson?”

“We hope to make it so,” Mr. Thompson responded.

“I should say you’ve taken on the deuce of a job,” Tommy commented frankly.

Thompson had no inclination to dispute that.  He had periods of thinking so himself.

The conversation languished again.

Without ever having been aware of it Thompson’s circle of friends and acquaintances had been people of wordy inclination.  Their thoughts dripped unceasingly from their tongue’s end like water from a leaky faucet.  He had never come in contact with a type of men who keep silent unless they have something to say, who think more than they speak.  The spinster aunts had been voluble persons, full of small chatter, women of no mental reservations whatever.  The young men of his group had not been much different.  The reflective attitude as opposed to the discursive was new to him.  New and embarrassing.  He felt impelled to talk, and while he groped uncertainly for some congenial subject he grew more and more acutely self-conscious.  He felt that these men were calmly taking his measure.  Especially Sam Carr.

He wanted to go on talking.  He protested against their intercourse congealing in that fashion.  But he could find no opening.  His conversational stock-in-trade, he had the sense to realize, was totally unlike theirs.  He could do nothing but sit still, remain physically inert while he was mentally in a state of extreme unrest.  He ventured a banality about the weather.  Carr smiled faintly.  Tommy Ashe observed offhand that the heat was beastly, but not a patch to blizzards and frost.  Then they were silent again.

Thompson had effected a sort of compromise with his principles when he sought Carr.  He had more or less consciously resolved to keep his calling in the background, to suppress the evangelical tendency which his training had made nearly second nature.  This for the sake of intelligent companionship.  He was like a man sentenced to solitary confinement.  Even the temporary presence of a jailer is a boon to such, a break in the ghastly solitude.  But he was fast succumbing to a despair of reaching across the barrier of this critical silence and he was about to rise and leave when he happened to look about and see Sophie Carr standing within arm’s length, gazing at him with a peculiar intentness, a mild look of surprise upon her vivid young face, a trace of puzzlement.