ss of whiskey in his hand, rather slack
in his chair, in his thickish overcoat. He did not want to drink. His
hair was blond, quite tidy, his mouth and chin handsome but a little
obstinate, his eyes inscrutable. His pallor was not natural to him.
Though he kept the appearance of a smile, underneath he was hard and
opposed. He did not wish to be with these people, and yet, mechanically,
he stayed.

"Do you feel quite well?" Josephine asked him.

He looked at her quickly.

"Me?" he said. He smiled faintly. "Yes, I'm all right." Then he dropped
his head again and seemed oblivious.

"Tell us your name," said Jim affectionately.

The stranger looked up.

"My name's Aaron Sisson, if it's anything to you," he said.

Jim began to grin.

"It's a name I don't know," he said. Then he named all the party
present. But the stranger hardly heeded, though his eyes looked
curiously from one to the other, slow, shrewd, clairvoyant.

"Were you on your way home?" asked Robert, huffy.

The stranger lifted his head and looked at him.

"Home!" he repeated. "No. The other road--" He indicated the direction
with his head, and smiled faintly.

"Beldover?" inquired Robert.

"Yes."

He had dropped his head again, as if he did not want to look at them.

To Josephine, the pale, impassive, blank-seeming face, the blue eyes
with the smile which wasn't a smile, and the continual dropping of the
well-shaped head was curiously affecting. She wanted to cry.

"Are you a miner?" Robert asked, _de haute en bas_.

"No," cried Josephine. She had looked at his hands.

"Men's checkweighman," replied Aaron. He had emptied his glass. He put
it on the table.

"Have another?" said Jim, who was attending fixedly, with curious
absorption, to the stranger.

"No," cried Josephine, "no more."

Aaron looked at Jim, then at her, and smiled slowly, with remote
bitterness. Then he lowered his head again. His hands were loosely
clasped between his knees.

"What about the wife?" said Robert--the young lieutenant.

"What about the wife and kiddies? You're a married man, aren't you?"

The sardonic look of the stranger rested on the subaltern.

"Yes," he said.

"Won't they be expecting you?" said Robert, trying to keep his temper
and his tone of authority.

"I expect they will--"

"Then you'd better be getting along, hadn't you?"

The eyes of the intruder rested all the time on the flushed subaltern.
The look on Aaron's face became slowly sa