of the night before. Then he rose, yawning
away the last of his drowsiness, and looked out over the roofs. He saw
that it was late afternoon, for the shadows of the water butts ran well
to the east. The mute solitude of the scene gave his loneliness a new
pang. He felt more solitary in the multitude than he had ever felt in
his unpeopled hills. Yet the place still lured him, not less than in
days when he had hungered for it, a starved lover of life in the desert.
If only he could find some one to come near, some one to whom he could
be his unguarded self. Such a one must exist.

His eyes swept the reticent roofs, and his mind searched beneath them:
what felicitous possibilities did they not conceal? People doubtless
fasting like himself, longing for the friendly cry, eating their hearts
out in loneliness--men and women he might know or never know. He lifted
each roof as he gazed; under any one of them might be the companion;
under all were charms of adventurous search.

In this moment of homesick longing his mind caught at Mrs. Laithe. She
had told him to come soon. Did that mean in one day, or in ten? She was
his one link with an old life that had filled if it did not satisfy. And
sometimes she had met him. Chiefly she had been a woman for the eyes,
but there had been fleeting times when they touched in ways that brought
him a deeper satisfaction--times when invisible antennae from each seemed
to be in communicative contact. These moments brought back the palsy of
shyness that had stricken him at his first glimpses of her; yet they
brought, too, some potent, strange essence that sustained him. He
resolved to go to her now. She mystified, she dismayed him, but her
kindness was dependable.

It was the memory of this that moved him to throw off his stale,
smoke-saturated garments, to bathe, to dress himself afresh, and to walk
briskly through the tonic sharpness of a September afternoon.

As he rang the bell a vague, delightful home-coming warmth rushed over
him.

"In a moment I shall see her," he said within himself. As the door swung
back he heard the din of many voices and caught a rush of heated air,
sweetish with the odor, as it seemed, of tired and fainting flowers. At
the entrance to the drawing room he faltered, for the place was thronged
with terrifying strange people who held teacups and talked explosively.

Longing to flee, he saw Mrs. Laithe across the room, turning somewhat
wearily, he thought, away fro