"My fingers are so cold," I apologized. I turned my face toward him with the stiffness of cold and tears upon it and there was an answering commiseration in his eyes. I reached out for the key and he took my hand in his, holding it to his breast with a movement of excluding human kindness. If the gesture was at all theatrical I did not feel it. I let him hold it there for a moment before I went in and shut the door. CHAPTER V Depression, as well as the storm which held on heavily all night and the next day, kept me close, and the state of my coal bin kept me in bed most of the next day. Along late in the afternoon I was aroused from a lethargy of cold and crying, by Leon Griffin tapping at the door to know how I did. The snow by this time had settled down to a blinding drift, and the thermometer had fallen into an incalculable void of cold. Griffin was in his overcoat as though he had just come in or was just going out, though I learned later he had been sitting in it all day in his room. The impression it created of his being in the act of passing, led me to open my door to him, as I otherwise might not have done. A terrible, cold blast came in with him and a clattering of the shutters on the windward wall of the house. Outside, the day was falling dusk; there was no light in the room but the square blank of the window curtained by the sliding screen of snow, and my little stove which glowed like a carbuncle in its corner. "You're cozy here"--he put it as an excuse for lingering, for I hadn't asked him to have a chair--"you hardly feel the wind. On my side there's a trail of snow half across the room where the wind whips it in between the casings." Though he had come ostensibly to offer me a neighbourly attention, he was plainly in need of it himself; it was his last night at the Varieté and, between the storm and the depression of having nothing to turn to, he was coming down with a cold. I had him into my one easy chair and suggested tea. "I hardly slept any last night," he apologized over his second cup, "the shutter clacks so." I could hear it now like the stroke of desolation.