st a startled look at her. "You're the only person in Endbury with
imagination enough to guess that."

"But why? why? why?" she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the
eagerness of her inquiry. "I feel just as though I were going to hear
the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle."

He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. "It wouldn't be polite to
tell you the answer, for what I'm trying to do is to get out of being
what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be--except Dr. Melton,
of course."

"What's the matter with 'all the people I know,'" she challenged him
explicitly.

He laughed and shook his head. "Oh, I've nothing new to say about them.
Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi."

"They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I
know."

Rankin looked at her whimsically. "Oh, _don't_ they?"

"_Do_ they?" Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought
out, as a patently absurd supposition, "You don't mean to say that
Endbury people are wicked?"

"Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious
books? No; Lord, no! I don't think they are wicked--just mistaken."

"What about? Now we're getting warm. I'll guess in a minute."

He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. "I'm afraid you
would never guess. It's all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and
out as you live, every minute."

"What? what? what? You can't say it, you see, when it comes right down
to the matter."

"Oh, yes, I can; I can ask you if it wouldn't be a tragedy if they
should all be killing themselves to get what they really don't want and
don't need, and starving for things they could easily have by just
putting out their hands."

Lydia's blankness was immense.

He said, with ironic triumph: "You see, when I do say it you can't make
anything out of it." After this he turned for a time all his attention
to his work.

He had evidently reached a critical point in his undertaking. Lydia
watched in silence the deft manipulations of his strong, brown fingers,
wondering at the eager, almost sparkling, alertness with which he went
from one step to another of the process that seemed unaccountably
complicated to her. After he had finally lifted the heavy piece of wood
into place, handling its great weight with assurance, and had submitted
the joint to the closest inspection, he gave a low whistle of
satisfaction with himself,