Does me, too." He was ready to agree with anything. "Now, down home,
tramping through the woods, I could drink a dozen cups a day. But it's
different in the city."

"Were your woods pines?" she asked, "and were there streams with
cypresses by the banks?"

Here at last they had found a meeting place, a common ground. If she
would not play or laugh with him, they could wander through the woods
together, tasting the tang of the evergreen or watching the buds burst
on the wild plum. Drawing his chair a little forward, he hugged his knee
and sang the song of the country of his birth.

Outside the rain splashed upon the street, making great puddles at the
crossings, the wind blew fiercely down the narrow roadways and shook the
windows in their frames; but within the little tenement the southern boy
moved without a cloud to shadow him through the playtime of his years.
Sometimes it was winter and he was among the hills trapping birds and
shooting rabbits. Again it was early spring and with rod in hand he
trailed the brown stream until the trout rose and brought him all
attention to the game they played that through his skill ended in death
and victory. Or it was summer and too hot to walk, but glorious to
gallop in the early morning over the rough road and down the hollow to
where the brook broadened into a swimming-pool that called him to bathe
in its reviving water. Again he moved among the woods in autumn,
hunting, but not too intent upon his game to fail to find the nuts
scattered upon his path or to stop and, putting his hand in a hole of a
decaying tree, bring out a blinking, monkey-faced owl.

"Why, it's half past ten," he cried, looking at the clock on the shelf
above the stove. "I must go, for we both have to work to-morrow."

He ventured this at a hazard, but she did not contradict him.

"Your coat is quite dry," she answered, feeling it as she came to take
it from the hook where it hung.

They stood in the narrow hallway and as he swung the coat upon his high
shoulders he was a little awkward and brushed against her arm. She
laughed away his apology, but he felt this slight contact as something
tender, exquisite. As he opened the door he could only mutter an
embarrassed good-evening.

"Thank you for coming out in the rain," she said, "and you mustn't take
cold or I shall think you ought not to have risked it."

"I'm tough." He moved out onto the stair. Wasn't she going to ask him to
come again? "By the way