und her on the
terrace, wrapped in furs, and evidently waiting for him.

"I wasn't enjoying it," she explained, when he had kissed her. "It's
a summer place, not heated to amount to anything, and when it turned
cold--where have you been to-night?"

"Dined at the Wards', and then took Elizabeth home."

"How is she?"

"She's all right."

"And there's no news?"

He knew her very well, and he saw then that she was laboring under
suppressed excitement.

"What's the matter, mother? You're worried about something, aren't you?"

"I have something to tell you. We'd better go inside." He followed her
in, unexcited and half smiling. Her world was a small one, of minor
domestic difficulties, of not unfriendly gossip, of occasional money
problems, investments and what not. He had seen her hands tremble over a
matter of a poorly served dinner. So he went into the house, closed the
terrace window and followed her to the library. When she closed the door
he recognized her old tactics when the servants were in question.

"Well?" he inquired. "I suppose--" Then he saw her face. "Sorry, mother.
What's the trouble?"

"Wallie, I saw Dick Livingstone in Chicago."

XXXVI

During August Dick had labored in the alfalfa fields of Central
Washington, a harvest hand or "working stiff" among other migratory
agricultural workers. Among them, but not entirely of them. Recruited
from the lowest levels as men grade, gathered in at a slave market on
the coast, herded in bunk houses alive with vermin, fully but badly fed,
overflowing with blasphemy and filled with sullen hate for those above
them in the social scale, the "stiffs" regarded him with distrust from
the start.

In the beginning he accepted their sneers with a degree of philosophy.
His physical condition was poor. At night he ached intolerably,
collapsing into his wooden bunk to sleep the dreamless sleep of utter
exhaustion. There were times when he felt that it would be better
to return at once to Norada and surrender, for that he must do so
eventually he never doubted. It was as well perhaps that he had no time
for brooding, but he gained sleep at the cost of superhuman exertion all
day.

A feeling of unreality began to obsess him, so that at times he felt
like a ghost walking among sweating men, like a resurrection into life,
but without life. And more than once he tried to sink down to the level
of the others, to unite himself again with the crowd, to feel again th