?"

Her voice was tinged with gentle raillery.

"Perhaps," he answered noncommittally.

It dawned upon him that for all his gladness to see her--and he was
glad--he nursed a tiny flame of resentment. He had come a long way
measured on the map, and a far greater distance measured in human
experience, in spiritual reckoning. If the old narrow faith had failed
him he felt that slowly and surely he was acquiring a faith that would
not fail him, because it was based on a common need of mankind. But he
was still sure there must be a wide divergence in their outlook. He was
getting his worldly experience, his knowledge of material factors, of
men's souls and faiths and follies and ideals and weaknesses in a rude
school at first hand--and Sophie had got hers out of books and logical
deductions from critically assembled fact. There was a difference in the
two processes. He knew, because he had tried both. And where the world
at large faced him, and must continue to face him, like an enemy
position, something to be stormed, very likely with fierce fighting, for
Sophie Carr it had all been made easy.

So he did not follow up that conversational lead. He was not going to
bare his soul offhand to gratify any woman's curiosity. It would be very
easy to make a blithering ass of himself again--with her--because of
her. Already he was on his guard against that. His pride was alert.

Sophie stowed the canvas tool roll under the seat cushion. She climbed
to her seat behind the steering column and turned to Thompson.

"Which way are you bound?" she asked. "I'll give you a lift, and we can
talk."

"I'm on my way to San Francisco," he said. "But time is no object in my
young life right now, or I'd take the Interurban instead of walking. It
would be demoralizing to me, I'm afraid, to whiz down these roads in a
machine like this."

Sophie shoved the opposite door open.

"Get in," she let a flavor of reproof creep into her tone. "Don't talk
that sort of nonsense."

Thompson hesitated. He was suddenly uncomfortable, conscious of his
dusty clothes somewhat the worse for wear, his shoes from which the
pristine freshness had long vanished, the day-old stubble on his chin.
There was a depressing contrast between his outward condition and that
of the smartly dressed girl whose gray eyes were resting curiously on
him now.

"Do you make a practice of picking up tramps along the road?" he parried
with an effort at lightness. He wanted to r