Thomason laboriously turned about, with a slight list to leeward, and ambled to the middle of the room, where he sat down on a bench. He took up a pair of steel-rimmed glasses from which one temple had been broken and replaced by a piece of twine. He slipped the twine over his head and adjusted the glasses on his nose. It seemed necessary for him to sit quite still to keep this contrivance in place. When he reached around to his bed for a coat, which he had evidently been mending, he held his head and body as rigid as possible. Bonnie May advanced into the room, her hands clasped before her, her eyes quite freely surveying her surroundings. “What a quaint setting!” she observed. Thomason jerked his needle through a tough place and pulled it out to arm’s length, holding his head with painful sedateness, on account of the glasses. He seemed afraid to glance to left or right. He made no reply at all. “I’ve been learning to use a needle, too,” she confided, thinking that he did not do it very skilfully. Thomason held his head as far back as possible and closed one eye. He was thus handicapping himself, it appeared, in order to get a better view of the work he held on his knee. “Would you like me to hold it, while you go across the room to look?” she asked. Thomason suddenly became quite rigid. It was as if his works had run down. He was thinking about what Bonnie May had said. Then, “Women!” he muttered, and the works seemed to have been wound up again. [Illustration: Thomason jerked his needle through a tough place and pulled it out to arm’s length.] This seemed a somewhat indefinite and meagre return for so much cheerful effort, and Bonnie May decided not to try any more just then. She went to the gable window and looked out. She was almost on a level with the fourth story of the building next door, which had been remodelled for use as a boarding-house. And looking up into the window nearest her, she suddenly became animated in the most extraordinary manner. A man was looking down at her, and in his eyes there was a puzzled expression to match the puzzled expression in her own. She turned, with subdued excitement, to Thomason, sitting on his bench near the middle of the room, with his bed and an old trunk for a shabby background. If he would only go away! She looked up at the man in the window opposite and smiled. In a guarded tone she remarked: “It’s a very nice day!” and instantly she turned toward Thomason again, so that he might believe she was addressing him in the event of his looking up from his work. But Thomason, believing this needless remark had been addressed to him, had borne enough. He arose laboriously, grasping his coat in one hand and his spectacles in the other, and left the room. At the door there was a muttered “Women!”--and then a bang. Bonnie May clasped her hands in delighted relief and drew closer to the window. “It’s Clifton!” she exclaimed to the man in the window opposite.