They all turned toward him and toward Lory as she rose, crimsoning as they looked at her. She went to the doorway where he stood. “I’ll lose my turn if I come now,” she said. He held her wrist and drew her into the hall. Other women were waiting to get into the room. Well-dressed, watching men went and came. “You come with me,” said the Inger. “But—” she tried to say. “You come along with me,” he repeated. And as her troubled look questioned him: “I’ve got two tickets to Washington,” he said. “You don’t want no job here if you get one.” “You hadn’t ought—” she began, breathlessly. “I know it,” he told her. “What I’d ought to ’a’ done was to get two tickets to Whiteface and the hut. Hadn’t I?” The baby, deserted, began to cry weakly. Lory turned back to her, stooped over her, comforted her. As he stood there, leaning in the doorway, once more there came to the Inger that curiously sharp sense of the morning on the prairie. For a flash as he looked at those empty faces and worn figures, he knew—positively and as at first hand—what it was to be, not Lory alone now, but all the rest. Abruptly, with some great wrench of the understanding, it was almost as if momentarily he were those other wretched creatures. When Lory had brought her pack and joined him, he stood for a moment, still staring into that room. “My God,” he said. “I wish I could do something for ’em!” He struggled with this. “‘Seems as if it’d help if I’d canter in and shoot every one of ’em dead,” he said. * * * * * They went out on the street again, intent on finding a place to lunch. There were two hours until the Washington train left. The Inger refusing utterly to ask anybody anything, they walked until they came to a place which, by hot flapjacks in the making in the great window, the Inger loudly recognized to be his own. Seated at a little white oil-cloth covered table beneath which the Inger insisted on stowing the packs, the two relaxed in that moment of rest and well-being. The Inger, seeing her there across from him, spoke out in a kind of wonder. “It seems like I can’t remember the time when you wasn’t along,” he said. She laughed—and it was pathetic to see how an interval of comfort and quiet warmed her back to security and girlishness. But not to the remotest coquetry. Of that, since the morning on the desert, he had had in her no glimpse. By this he knew dimly all that he had forfeited. He made wistful attempts to call forth even a shadow of her old way. “A week ago,” he said, “I hardly knew you.” She assented gravely, and found no more to say about it. “A week ago,” he said, “I was fishing, and didn’t bring home nothin’ but a turtle.” He smiled at a recollection. “I was scrapin’ him out,” he said, “when I heard your weddin’ bell. How’d you ever come to have a weddin’ bell?” he wondered. “It was Bunchy’s doing,” she said, listlessly. “He sent the priest a case o’ somethin’, to have it rung. I hated it.”