ally Sam Carr.

He wanted to go on talking. He protested against their intercourse
congealing in that fashion. But he could find no opening. His
conversational stock-in-trade, he had the sense to realize, was totally
unlike theirs. He could do nothing but sit still, remain physically
inert while he was mentally in a state of extreme unrest. He ventured a
banality about the weather. Carr smiled faintly. Tommy Ashe observed
offhand that the heat was beastly, but not a patch to blizzards and
frost. Then they were silent again.

Thompson had effected a sort of compromise with his principles when he
sought Carr. He had more or less consciously resolved to keep his
calling in the background, to suppress the evangelical tendency which
his training had made nearly second nature. This for the sake of
intelligent companionship. He was like a man sentenced to solitary
confinement. Even the temporary presence of a jailer is a boon to such,
a break in the ghastly solitude. But he was fast succumbing to a despair
of reaching across the barrier of this critical silence and he was about
to rise and leave when he happened to look about and see Sophie Carr
standing within arm's length, gazing at him with a peculiar intentness,
a mild look of surprise upon her vivid young face, a trace of
puzzlement.

A most amazing thing happened to Mr. Thompson. His heart leaped.

Perhaps it rarely happens that a normal, healthy man reaches a
comparative degree of maturity without experiencing a quickening of his
blood in the presence of a woman. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that it does
happen. It was so in Thompson's case. Staring into the clear pools of
Sophie Carr's gray eyes some strange quality of attraction in a woman
first dawned on him. Something that made him feel a passionate sense of
incompleteness.

He did not think this. The singular longing had flamed up like a beacon
within him. It had nothing to do with his mental processes. It was
purely an instinctive revelation. A blind man whose sight has been
restored, upon whose eager vision bursts suddenly all the bright beauty
of sun and sky and colorful landscape, could have been no more
bewildered than he. It was as if indeed he had been blind.

All the women he had ever known seemed pale and colorless beside this
girl standing near, her head a little aside as she looked at him. There
was not a detail of her that escaped him, that failed to make its
appeal, from the perfect oval of her fac