voiceless, and he now started at every sound. For the first time he
became aware of the dreadful disorder and untidiness of its uninvaded
privacy. He could scarcely believe he had been living with his stove,
his bed, and cooking utensils all in one corner of the barnlike room,
and he began to put them "to rights" in a rough, hard formality,
strongly suggestive of his convict experience. He rolled up his blankets
into a hard cylinder at the head of his cot. He scraped out his kettles
and saucepans, and even "washed down" the floor, afterwards sprinkling
clean dry sand, hot with the noonday sunshine, on its half-dried boards.
In arranging these domestic details he had to change the position of a
little mirror; and glancing at it for the first time in many days, he
was dissatisfied with his straggling beard,--grown during his voyage
from Australia,--and although he had retained it as a disguise, he at
once shaved it off, leaving only a mustache, and revealing a face from
which a healthier life and out-of-door existence had removed the last
traces of vice and dissipation. But he did not know it.

All the next day he thought of his fair visitor, and found himself often
repeating her odd remark that she was "not that kind of girl," with a
smile that was alternately significant or vacant. Evidently she could
take care of herself, he thought, although her very good looks no doubt
had exposed her to the rude attentions of fishermen or the common drift
of San Francisco wharves. Perhaps this was why her father brought her
here. When the day passed and she came not, he began vaguely to wonder
if he had been rude to her. Perhaps he had taken her simple remark too
seriously; perhaps she had expected he would only laugh, and had found
him dull and stupid. Perhaps he had thrown away an opportunity. An
opportunity for what? To renew his old life and habits? No, no! The
horrors of his recent imprisonment and escape were still too fresh in
his memory; he was not safe yet. Then he wondered if he had not grown