The next fifteen minutes were exciting ones for Lowndes. His mind was in a tumult. It is no light matter to make one’s self the arbiter of another man’s destiny; and he knew enough of Witherle to feel sure that the man’s future was in his hands. He looked down at him dubiously, his strong hands still clutching the rail tensely. For a minute he felt that he must move on without making his presence known, but even as he resolved, the clocks and whistles clamorously announced the hour. When the men quitted their work, the man whom Lowndes’s eyes were following came up the stairs that led to the bridge. As he passed, Lowndes laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. “How are you, Witherle?” he said. The man stared at him blankly a second, recoiled, and his face turned livid as he shook off the friendly hand. The other men had passed on, and they were alone on the bridge. “I’m a free man,” said Witherle, loudly, throwing back his shoulders. “Before God, I’m a free man for the first time in my life. What do you want with me?” “Don’t rave,” said Lowndes, sharply. “I sha’n’t hurt you. You couldn’t expect me to pass you without speaking, could you?” “Then you weren’t looking for me?” asked Witherle, abjectly. “I have business on hand.” Lowndes spoke impatiently, for he did not enjoy seeing his old friend cower. “I am here for the Diamond Oil Co. I was crossing the bridge just now, when I saw a man down there shovelling coal as if he liked it; and I delayed to look, and saw it was you. So I waited for you. That is all there is of it. You needn’t stop if you don’t wish.” Witherle drew a deep breath. “My nerves aren’t what they were,” he said, apologetically. “It played the mischief with them to--” He left the sentence hanging in the air. “If you weren’t going to like the results, you needn’t have gone,” observed Lowndes, in an impartial tone. “Nobody has been exactly able to see the reasons for your departure. You left the folks at home a good deal stirred up.” “What do they say about me there?” Lowndes hesitated. “Most of them say you were crazy. Your wife has gone back to her people.” “Ah!” Lowndes looked at the man with a sudden impulse of pity. He was leaning against the rail, breathing heavily. His face was white beneath the soot, but in his eyes still flamed that incomprehensible ecstasy. He was inebriate with the subtle stimulus of some transcendent thought. But what thought? And what had brought him here? This creature, with his sensitive mouth, his idealist’s eyes, his scholar’s hands, black and hardened now but still clearly recognizable, was at least more out of place among the coal-heavers than he had been in the pulpit. Lowndes felt mightily upon him the desire to shepherd this man back to some more sheltered fold. The highways of existence were not for his feet; not for his lips the “Song of the Open Road.” He did not resist the desire to say, meditatively: “You have no children----”