He did return late the next morning. After he had taken his place he
looked over at her and smiled. He looked sick and shaken--as if
something that knew no mercy had taken hold of him and wrung body
and soul.

"You have been ill?" she asked, with timid solicitude.

"Oh no," he replied, rather shortly.

He was quiet all that day, but the next day they talked about the
work, laughed together over funny definitions they found. She felt
that he could tell many interesting things about himself, if he
cared to.

As the days went on he did tell some of those things--out of the way
places where he had worked, queer people whom he had known. It
seemed that words came to him as gifts, came freely, happily,
pleased, perhaps, to be borne by so sympathetic a voice. And there
was another thing about him. He seemed always to know just what she
was trying to say; he never missed the unexpressed. That made it
easy to say things to him; there seemed a certain at-homeness
between his thought and hers. She accounted for her interest in him
by telling herself she had never known any one like that before. Now
Harold, the boy whom she knew best out at the university, why one
had to _say_ things to Harold to make him understand! And
Harold never left one wondering--wondering what he had meant by that
smile, what he had been going to say when he started to say
something and stopped, wondering what it was about his face that one
could not understand. Harold never could claim as his the hour after
he had left her, and was one ever close to anyone with whom one did