“Really big?”

“Well—­there again. ...  When I took him down to the country, looking rather like a tramp from a ‘Shelter,’ with an untrimmed beard, and a suit of reach-me-downs he’d slept round the Park in for a week, I felt sure my mother’d carry the silver up to her room, and send for the gardener’s dog to sleep in the hall the first night.  But she didn’t.”

“I see.  ‘Women and children love him.’  Oh, Wade!” Bernald groaned.

“Not a bit of it!  You’re out again.  We don’t love him, either of us.  But we feel him—­the air’s charged with him.  You’ll see.”

And Bernald agreed that he would see, the following Sunday.  Wade’s inarticulate attempts to characterize the stranger had struck his friend.  The human revelation had for Bernald a poignant and ever-renewed interest, which his trade, as the dramatic critic of a daily paper, had hitherto failed to discourage.  And he knew that Bob Wade, simple and undefiled by literature—­Bernald’s specific affliction—­had a free and personal way of judging men, and the diviner’s knack of reaching their hidden springs.  During the days that followed, the young doctor gave Bernald farther details about John Winterman:  details not of fact—­for in that respect his visitor’s reticence was baffling—­but of impression.  It appeared that Winterman, while lying insensible in the Park, had been robbed of the few dollars he possessed; and on leaving the hospital, still weak and half-blind, he had quite simply and unprotestingly accepted the Wades’ offer to give him shelter till such time as he should be strong enough to go to work.

“But what’s his work?” Bernald interjected.  “Hasn’t he at least told you that?”

“Well, writing.  Some kind of writing.”  Doctor Bob always became vague and clumsy when he approached the confines of literature.  “He means to take it up again as soon as his eyes get right.”

Bernald groaned.  “Oh, Lord—­that finishes him; and me! He’s looking for a publisher, of course—­he wants a ‘favourable notice.’  I won’t come!”

“He hasn’t written a line for twenty years.”

“A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years?”

Wade surprised him.  “The real kind, I should say.  But I don’t know Winterman’s line,” the doctor added.  “He speaks of the things he used to write merely as ‘stuff that wouldn’t sell.’  He has a wonderfully confidential way of not telling one things.  But he says he’ll have to do something for his living as soon as his eyes are patched up, and that writing is the only trade he knows.  The queer thing is that he seems pretty sure of selling now.  He even talked of buying the bungalow of us, with an acre or two about it.”

“The bungalow?  What’s that?”

“The studio down by the shore that we built for Howland when he thought he meant to paint.” (Howland Wade, as Bernald knew, had experienced various “calls.”) “Since he’s taken to writing nobody’s been near it.  I offered it to Winterman, and he camps there—­cooks his meals, does his own house-keeping, and never comes up to the house except in the evenings, when he joins us on the verandah, in the dark, and smokes while my mother knits.”