In the most desolate part of this desolate country, the car was stopped, and two Syrians laden with heavy grips got on.  These tall, darkly gaunt men, their sinister picturesqueness thinly disguised by their Western garb, these Orientals in the midst of the extremest phase of the New World, passed Carroll with grace, and seated themselves, with a weary air, and yet an air of ineffable lengths of time at command, suggestive of anything but weariness.  There was actually, or so Carroll fancied, a faint odor of attar of rose and sandal-wood evident in the horribly close car.  The men had in their grips rosaries, and Eastern stuffs or Eastern trinkets of the cheapest description.

To Arthur Carroll, regarding them, the fancy occurred, as it had often occurred, of himself following a similar pursuit.  He had revolved in his mind all possible schemes of money-making, of winning an honest living.  All the more dignified methods, the methods apparently suited to himself, seemed out of his reach.  He pictured himself laden with a heavy grip, with two of them, one painfully poised on the hip, the other dragging at the hand, going about the country, concealing his rage with abjectness and humility, striving to dispose of his small and worthless wares for money enough to keep the machinery going.

“I believe I would make a very good peddler,” he thought.  Although his grace of address was involuntary, like any keenly intelligent and retrospective man, he could not avoid being aware of it.  He felt that he could outstrip that saturnine Syrian in his own field.

Looking away from them, his eyes met the little boy’s, also returning from a sober, innocent contemplation of them, and the boy’s eyes again smiled at him with an odd, confidential expression.  So clearly wise and understanding was their direct regard, that it almost seemed as if the child guessed at the man’s thoughts; but that was, of course, impossible.  Carroll smiled at him again, and the little face blushed and dimpled like a girl’s with admiration and grateful delight.  He was a daintily built little boy, with nothing of Eddy’s little dash of manner, but he was charming.  The car reached Port Willis and proceeded along the principal street.  Carroll suddenly reflected that he must soon get off; he would reach the end of the line.  Again his errand loomed up before him.  The necessity for immediate action removed the paralyzing effect which the very horror of it had had upon him for a time.  Curiously enough, during the half-hour in the car he had held, as it were, a little truce with this fell appetite which had seized upon him.  He had thought very little of it.  The strange inertia of passivity in motion of the other passengers had seized upon him, but now was coming a period of wakening.  The passengers began to drop off.  The bridal-party went out chattering and laughing, the prospective bride with ugly red spots of agitation on her high cheek-bones, the pretty girl holding up her laced petticoats with