He kept his eyes steadily on her while he shook hands.

"I'm glad I know some one in Lukin," said Connor. "Good night, again."

_CHAPTER FOUR_

When Connor wakened the next morning, after his first impression of
blinding light, he closed his eyes and waited for the sense of unhappy
doom which usually comes to men of tense nerves and active life after
sleep; but, with slow and pleasant wonder, he realized that the old
numbness of brain and fever of pulse was gone. Then he looked up and
lazily watched the shadow of the vine at his window move across the
ceiling, a dim-bordered shadow continually changing as the wind gathered
the leaves in solid masses and shook them out again. He pored upon this
for a time, and next he watched a spider spinning a web in the corner;
she worked in a draft which repeatedly lifted her from her place before
she had fastened her thread, and dropped her a foot or more into space.
Connor sat up to admire the artisan's skill and courage. Compared to men
and insects, the spider really worked over an abyss two hundred feet
deep, suspended by a silken thread. Connor slipped out of bed and stood
beneath the growing web while the main cross threads were being
fastened. He had been there for some time when, turning away to rub the
ache out of the back of his neck, he again met the contrast between the
man of this morning and the man of other days.

This time it was his image in the mirror, meeting him as he turned. That
deep wrinkle in the middle of the forehead was half erased. The lips
were neither compressed nor loose and shaking, and the eye was calm--it
rested him to meet that glance in the mirror.

A mood of idle content always brings one to the window: Connor looked
out on the street. A horseman hopped past like a day shadow, the
hoofbeats muffled by thick sand, and the wind, moving at an exactly
equal pace, carried a mist of dust just behind the horse's tail.
Otherwise there was neither life nor color in the street of
weather-beaten, low buildings, and the eye of Connor went beyond the
roofs and began to climb the mountains. Here was a bald bright cliff,
there a drift of trees, and again a surface of raw clay from which the
upper soil had recently slipped; but these were not stopping
points--they were rather the steps which led the glance to a sky of pale
and transparent blue, and Connor felt a great desire to have that sky
over him in place of a ceiling.

He splashed through a has