stinctness, and when he spoke his voice was
hoarse, as though the damp tendrils of the mist had penetrated to his
throat.

Answering something to his greeting, she led him through the hall into
the sitting-room. He paused as he entered. Without looking back, she
crossed to the fireplace, and kneeling down, stirred the fire.

'May I help?'

'No, thanks. I prefer to do it.'

Her answer had followed so swiftly on his question that he stopped in the
act of stepping forward. She looked over her shoulder with a swift,
searching glance.

His face was a tired gray, and the silk scarf thrown about his neck
looked oddly vivid against the black evening-clothes and overcoat. But
if his face suggested weariness, his eyes were alive with dynamic force.
The intensity of the man's personality strangely moved Elise. She felt
the presence of a mind and a body vibrating with tremendous purpose--a
man who drew vitality from others, yet charged them in return with his
own greater store.

To her he seemed to have divorced himself from type--he had lost even the
usual characteristics of race. With the thought, she wondered how far
his solitary life had effected the transition, if his idealism had
brought him loneliness.

'Won't you sit down?' she said hesitatingly.

He acquiesced, and took a seat in the chair from which Maynard had run
the emotional gamut the previous evening.

'You look pale,' she said, drawing a chair near the fire. 'I hope you
have not been unwell.'

'No--no; it is merely that I have been so little out of doors. I could
not gather from your note what kind of work you were engaged in. I see
you are an ambulance-driver. I congratulate you.'

His voice conveyed nothing but polite interest in an obvious situation.
With over-sensitive apprehension she listened for any suggestion of
sarcasm that lay behind his words, but she could detect nothing beyond
mere impersonal courtesy--that, and a far-off weariness, as of one who
has passed the borders of fatigue.

'I wrote to your mother,' he said, 'when I heard of your elder brother's
death. It must have been a great grief to you all.'

She did not answer him. His manner was so cold that he might have been
deliberately disposing of a number of prepared comments rendered
imperative by the laws of polite intercourse.

'Why didn't you let us know you had seen Dick?' she said abruptly.

'Then--you have heard?' He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

'Only l