umph, shaking out a rain-coat, "That will keep your pretty French
finery dry."

He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair,
peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face.
"Why, what's the matter?" he asked.

[Illustration: "You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My
rough quarters are glorified for me."]

Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. "I don't know," she said,
"what it is. It seems as though I'd been here before. It looks so
familiar to me--so good--" She went closer to where, still holding out
the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers.
She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy
eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling
which she had no words to express. "Don't you know," she went on, "every
once in a while you see somebody--an old man or woman, perhaps, on the
street cars, in the street--and somehow the face goes home to you. It
seems as though you'd been waiting to see that face again. Well, it's
just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very--" She broke off,
helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked
timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she
tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions
which made her life so full of invisible incidents.

But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than
serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. "You say
beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My rough quarters are glorified
for me. I've been fond of them before--they're the background to a good
many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but
now--" He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold
with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the
fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded
lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like
flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the
other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the
house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the
rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of
the dried grass under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops
on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid