ay light sifting through the windows the
beans did not look as good as they had tasted the night before, and the
early mouthfuls were less blithesome on the palate than the remembered
ones of yesterday. He thought perhaps he was not so hungry as he had
been at his first encounter with them. He delicately removed a pocket
of ashes from the centre, and tried again. They tasted better now. The
mould of tender tints was again visible but he made no effort to avoid
it. For his appetite had reawakened. He was truly hungry, and ate with
an entire singleness of purpose.

Toward the last of the meal his conscious self feebly prompted him to
quit, to save against the inevitable hunger of the night. But the voice
was ignored. He was now clay to the moulding of the subconscious. He
could have saved a few of the beans when reason was again enthroned, but
they were so very few that he fatuously thought them not worth saving.
Might as well make a clean job of it. He restored the stewpan and spoon
to their places and left his hotel. He was fed. To-day something else
would have to happen.

The plush hat cocked at a rakish angle, he walked abroad with something
of the old confident swagger. Once he doubtfully fingered the sprouting
beard, but resolutely dismissed a half-formed notion of finding out how
the Holden lot barber would regard a proposition from a new patron to
open a charge account. If nothing worse than remaining unshaven was
going to happen to him, what cared he? The collar was still pretty good.
Why let his beard be an incubus? He forgot it presently in noticing that
the people arriving on the Holden lot all looked so extremely well fed.
He thought it singular that he should never before have noticed how many
well-fed people one saw in a day.

Late in the afternoon his explorations took him beyond the lower end of
his little home street, and he was attracted by sounds of the picture
drama from a rude board structure labelled the High Gear Dance Hall. He
approached and entered with that calm ease of manner which his days on
the lot had brought to a perfect bloom. No one now would ever
suppose that he was a mere sightseer or chained to the Holden lot by
circumstances over which he had ceased to exert the slightest control.

The interior of the High Gear Dance Hall presented nothing new to his
seasoned eye. It was the dance-hall made familiar by many a smashing
five-reel Western. The picture was, quite normally, waiting.
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