or what he was; he would have done much to still that pleading voice and
pacify him, but since he could not do this, he would go for a little
while out of sight and hearing. He was fast growing numb with the fierce
cold. He would come back and renew his care, but just now he would go
home. He walked fast, and gained his own door with blood that ran less
chill.

He heaped his stove with fresh logs, and set on food to warm, in the
hope that the stranger might eventually partake of it, and then, opening
the stove door to get the full benefit of the blaze, he sat down for a
little while to warm himself. He looked at his watch, as it lay on the
table, with that glance of interest which we cast at a familiar thing
which has lain in the same place while our minds have undergone
commotion and change. Midnight had passed since he went out, and it was
now nearly two o'clock.

Whether it was that the man with whom he had been, possessed that power,
which great actors involuntarily possess, of imposing their own moods on
others, or whether it was that, coming into such strange companionship
after his long loneliness, his sympathies were the more easily awakened,
Trenholme was suffering from a misery of pity; and in pity for another
there weighed a self-pity which was quite new to him. To have seen the
stalwart old man, whose human needs were all so evident to Trenholme's
eyes, but to his own so evidently summed up in that one need which was
the theme of the prayer he was offering in obstinate agony, was an
experience which for the time entirely robbed him of the power of seeing
the elements of life in that proportion to which his mind's eye had
grown accustomed--that is, seeing the things of religion as a shadowy
background for life's important activities.