Just then the alarm-clock purred a brief signal.

Up to that time the air of the man with the brown eyes had been that of banter, of impish desire to harry and confuse by stilted language the ignorant stranger who had come blundering upon him.

He stared at the clock, looked down upon the frock-coat, and then surveyed the other articles of clothing.  He scowled as if he had suddenly begun to reflect.  Seriousness smoldered in the brown eyes.  That tinkling touch of metal against metal seemed to change his mood in astonishing fashion.

“Ah, it may be morning again, O my soul!” he cried with such tense feeling in his voice that the tramp surveyed him with gaping mouth and bulging eyes, as one stares at a person suddenly become mad.

“I will talk to you though you will not understand!  Once upon a time the world was ruled by men who were ruled by omens.  Man was then not so wise in his own conceit.  His own soul was nearer the soul of things.  He was not a mere gob of bumptiousness covered with the shell of cocksureness.  He was willing to be informed.  He sought the omens of true nature—­he allowed Fate to guide him.  He was not a pig running against the goad of circumstances, unheeding the upflung arms of Fortune, waving him toward the right path.  He was simpler—­he was truer.  He felt that he was a part of nature instead of being boss of nature.  Well, I have got nearer to true nature since I have been in the open.  I am in contact with the soul of things.  I am no longer insulated.  I am not reformed, I am simply ready once again to grab Opportunity.  So you think I am crazy, do you?”

“They had a gink in a padded cell in the jail where I was last winter and he didn’t take on much worse’n you,” stated the tramp.

“As a brainless observer you may be quite right.  I may be a lunatic.  I feel much like one just now.  It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked.  But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—­and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead in me.  A moment later came habiliments of a gentleman, borne in the arms of a wretch who could not wear them.  There came Opportunity.  Then the jangle of that clock signaled Opportunity—­and there was a throb in me as though my sleeping soul had rolled and blinked at the sunlight of hope and had murmured, ‘It’s morning again.’  Such are omens, when one is ready to heed.”

He set his teeth, clenched his fists, and by expression and attitude showed that he had arrived at a decision of moment.  He walked close to the tramp.  “I will admit, Friend Belly-brains, that you came upon Opportunity before I did this day.  But tell me again, are you to make no further use of said Opportunity than to run to an old-clothes shop and exchange for a few pennies that which will help to make a man?”

“They are mine and I’m going to sell ’em,” retorted the sullen vagrant.