upon the blaze.

"There are five more," he observed. "They will make a good fire."

He arranged the burning mass to suit him, looked at it, and then turned.

"You ought to be a little nearer," he said, and he lifted the chair with
her in it and set her before the fireplace.

It had all looked and felt desperately desolate half a minute earlier.
It was changed now. He went to a corner and filled a small glass with
wine from a straw-covered flask and brought it to her. She thanked him
with her eyes and drank half of it eagerly. He knelt down before the
fire again, for as the paper burned away underneath, the light sticks
fell inward and might go out. When he had arranged it all again, he
looked round and met her eyes, still kneeling.

"Is that better?" he asked quietly.

"You are so good," said Gloria, letting her eyelids droop as she looked
from him to the pleasant flame.

He put out his hand and gently touched the hem of her cloth skirt.

"You are drenched," he said.

Then, before she realized what he was doing, he bent down and kissed the
wet cloth, and without looking at her rose to his feet, got another
chair and sat down near her. A soft blush of pleasure had risen in her
cheeks. They were little things that he did, but they were like him,
unaffected, strong, direct. Another man would have made apologies for
having no wood and would have tried to make a fire of the single stick.
Another man would have made excuses for the disorder of his room, or for
the poverty of its furniture, perhaps. The other man she thought of was
her husband, and possibly she had her father in her mind, too.

"When you are rested, tell me your story," he said, and his face
hardened all at once.

She began to speak in a low and uncertain voice, reciting almost
mechanically many things which she had often told him before. He
listened without moving a muscle. Her voice was dear to him, whether she
repeated the endless history of her woes for the tenth or the hundredth
time. Where she was concerned he had no judgment, and he had no
criterion, for he had never loved another woman with whom he could
compare her. All that was of her was of paramount interest and weighty
importance. He could not hear it too often. But to-night her first words
had told him of the violent crisis in her life with Reanda, and he
listened to all she said, before she reached that point, with an
interest he had never felt before. But he would not look at her, f