It must have been an hour later when Winston drove in from Flat Rock,
shook the powdery snow from off his long fur overcoat, his cheeks still
tingling from the sharp wind, and, with fingers yet stiffened by cold,
wrote his name carelessly across the lower line of the dilapidated
hotel register.

"Can you let me have the same room, Tom?" he questioned familiarly of
the man ornamenting the high stool behind the desk.

The latter, busy with some figures, nodded carelessly, and the last
arrival promptly picked up his valise from the floor and began climbing
the stairs, whistling softly. He was a long-limbed, broad-chested
young fellow, with clean-shaven face, and a pair of dark-gray eyes that
looked straight ahead of him; and he ran up the somewhat steep steps as
though finding such exercise a pleasure. Rounding the upper railing,
he stopped abruptly before Number Twenty-seven, flung open the door,
took a single step within, and came to a sudden pause, his careless
whistling suspended in breathless surprise. With that single glance
the complete picture became indelibly photographed upon his
memory,--the narrow, sparsely furnished room with roughly plastered
walls; the small, cheap mirror; the faded-green window curtain, torn
half in two; the sheet-iron wash-stand; the wooden chair, across which
rested the gray coat with the blue toque on top; and the single cot bed
bearing its unconscious occupant.

Somehow as he gazed, his earliest conscious emotion was that of
sympathy--it all appeared so unspeakably pathetic, so homesick, so
dismally forlorn and barren. Then that half-upturned face riveted his
attention and seemed to awaken a vague, dreamy memory he found himself
unable to localize; it reminded him of some other face he had known,