cheeks and hair, the while her grey eyes, fixed and remote, seemed lost in speculation. Then she looked up again:

“Why should I think to find you different?” she asked, “Is any man different from his fellows, humble or great? Is it not man himself, not only men, that I must face as I have faced you — with silence, or with sullen speech, or with a hardness far beyond my years, and a gaiety that means nothing more kind than insolence?”

Again her head fell on her breast, and her hands linked themselves on her knees as she knelt there in silence.

“Lois,” I said, trying to think clearly, “I do not know that other men and I are different. Once I believed so. But — lately — I do not know.