She glanced at the snake significantly.

"You killed it in the nick of time," he said, in a voice that still spoke
of the ground, but with a note of half-shamed gratitude. "I want to
thank you," he added. "You were brave. It would have turned on you if
you had missed. I know them. I've killed five." He spoke very slowly,
huskily.

"Well, you are safe--that is the chief thing," she rejoined, making as
though to depart. But presently she turned back. "Why are you so
dreadfully poor--and everything?" she asked gently.

His eye wandered over the lake and back again before he answered her, in
a dull, heavy tone: "I've had bad luck, and, when you get down, there are
plenty to kick you farther."

"You weren't always poor as you are now--I mean long ago, when you were
young."

"I'm not so old," he rejoined sluggishly--"only thirty-four."

She could not suppress her astonishment. She looked at the hair already
grey, the hard, pinched face, the lustreless eyes.

"Yet it must seem long to you," she said with meaning. Now he laughed
--a laugh sodden and mirthless. He was thinking of his boyhood.
Everything, save one or two spots all fire or all darkness, was dim
in his debilitated mind.

"Too far to go back," he said, with a gleam of the intelligence which had