“Why did you let the holes get so deep?”

“I’ve just come here.  The house was like the tree the shingles all rotten, but the beams were sound.  Those beams were hewn out of the forest two hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Gracious!” said Janet.  “And how old is the tree?”

“I should say about a hundred.  I suppose it wouldn’t care to admit it.”

“How do you know?” she inquired.

“Oh, I’m very intimate with trees.  I find out their secrets.”

“It’s your house!” she exclaimed, somewhat appalled by the discovery.

“Yes—­yes it is,” he answered, looking around at it and then in an indescribably comical manner down at his clothes.  His gesture, his expression implied that her mistake was a most natural one.

“Excuse me, I thought—­” she began, blushing hotly, yet wanting to laugh again.

“I don’t blame you—­why shouldn’t you?” he interrupted her.  “I haven’t got used to it yet, and there is something amusing about—­my owning a house.  When the parlour’s finished I’ll have to wear a stiff collar, I suppose, in order to live up to it.”

Her laughter broke forth, and she tried to imagine him in a stiff collar....  But she was more perplexed than ever.  She stood balancing on one foot, poised for departure.

“I ought to be going,” she said, as though she had been paying him a formal visit.

“Don’t hurry,” he protested cordially.  “Why hurry back to Hampton?”

“I never want to go back!” she cried with a vehemence that caused him to contemplate her anew, suddenly revealing the intense, passionate quality which had so disturbed Mr. Ditmar.  She stood transformed.  “I hate it!” she declared.  “It’s so ugly, I never want to see it again.”

“Yes, it is ugly,” he confessed.  “Since you admit it, I don’t mind saying so.  But it’s interesting, in a way.”  Though his humorous moods had delighted her, she felt subtly flattered because he had grown more serious.

“It is interesting,” she agreed.  She was almost impelled to tell him why, in her excursions to the various quarters, she had found Hampton interesting, but a shyness born of respect for the store of knowledge she divined in him restrained her.  She was curious to know what this man saw in Hampton.  His opinion would be worth something.  Unlike her neighbours in Fillmore Street, he was not what her sister Lise would call “nutty”; he had an air of fine sanity, of freedom, of detachment,—­though the word did not occur to her; he betrayed no bitter sense of injustice, and his beliefs were uncoloured by the obsession of a single panacea.  “Why do you think it’s interesting?” she demanded.

“Well, I’m always expecting to hear that it’s blown up.  It reminds me of nitro-glycerine,” he added, smiling.

She repeated the word.

“An explosive, you know—­they put it in dynamite.  They say a man once made it by accident, and locked up his laboratory and ran home—­and never went back.”