."

He said no more, and I had to guess the rest from the inflection of his
voice and his sharp relapse into silence.

Another day, on getting into my train at the Flats, I missed a volume
of popular science--I think it was on some recent discoveries in
bio-chemistry--which I had carried with me to read on the way. I thought
no more about it till I got into the sleigh again that evening, and saw
the book in Frome's hand.

"I found it after you were gone," he said.

I put the volume into my pocket and we dropped back into our usual
silence; but as we began to crawl up the long hill from Corbury Flats to
the Starkfield ridge I became aware in the dusk that he had turned his
face to mine.

"There are things in that book that I didn't know the first word about,"
he said.

I wondered less at his words than at the queer note of resentment in
his voice. He was evidently surprised and slightly aggrieved at his own
ignorance.

"Does that sort of thing interest you?" I asked.

"It used to."

"There are one or two rather new things in the book: there have been
some big strides lately in that particular line of research." I waited
a moment for an answer that did not come; then I said: "If you'd like to
look the book through I'd be glad to leave it with you."

He hesitated, and I had the impression that he felt himself about to
yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then, "Thank you--I'll take it," he
answered shortly.

I hoped that this incident might set up some more direct communication
between us. Frome was so simple and straightforward that I was sure his
curiosity about the book was based on a genuine interest in its subject.
Such tastes and acquirements in a man of his condition made the contrast
more poignant between his outer situation and his inner needs, and I
hoped that the chance of giving expression to the latter might at least
unseal his lips. But something in his past history, or in his present
way of living, had apparently driven him too deeply into himself for any
casual impulse to draw him back to his kind. At our next meeting he made
no allusion to the book, and our intercourse seemed fated to remain as
negative and one-sided as if there had been no break in his reserve.

Frome had been driving me over to the Flats for about a week when one
morning I looked out of my window into a thick snow-fall. The height of
the white waves massed against the garden-fence and along the wall of
the church showed t