listen to the troubles of others.

It was only the matter of minutes before Mary was chatting artlessly
with this traveler of the mountain road, and since she was a child she
was talking of herself, while he nodded gravely and listened with a
deference of attention that was to her new and disarmingly charming.

He, too, was just now an exile here in the hills, he explained, but
before he came he had lived all over the world. He had studied under
tutors while traveling about the Continent, and being prepared to take
up his work in the banking house which his grandfather had established
and his father had extended in scope. Then it had happened.

"What happened?" The child of Lake Forsaken put the question eagerly,
and his reply was laconic, though he smiled down from the buggy seat
with a peculiarly naïve twist of his lips. "Bugs," he told her.

"What kind of bugs?" It seemed strange to Mary that a man would let such
small creatures as flies or spiders or even big beetles stand between
himself and a great bank.

"I beg your pardon," he laughed. "I forgot that you lived in a world
unsullied by such argot. You know what a lunger is?"

That she did know. It is a term familiar enough in the mountains to
which come refugees from the white plague, seeking in the tonic air a
healing for their sickened lungs.

"And so you see," said the strange young man, "I have built me a log
shack back in the hills where I amuse myself writing verses--which,