Kenniston was looking out of the door, with that sullen sense of injury and hopelessness which oppresses a city man in the country in bad weather. The world had slipped away, somehow; he was left to the vague unresponsiveness of the inexpressive white mists; the rain would probably continue forever; the day was of a longevity known to no other that had ever dawned; without the prompting of his watch he could not have said if it were morning or afternoon. The roof leaked; the boots of his uncouth visitors tracked up the floor with red clay mud. A saddle in one corner gave out an obtrusive odor of leather, and the monkey stove, despite all this dankness, filled the room with that baking, dry, afflicting aroma common to all its kindred. His pugnacity was abated under these untoward conditions; his enthusiasms were overwhelmed beneath the depression of the rain. He thought wistfully of Bretonville, and of a cosy corner in the reading-room of a certain club, and of his office, and sighed as his mind reverted to the jeopardy of the present, the futility of the money and thought he had spent here, and the froward tangle which must needs be untwisted if these unpromising assets were to be utilized at all. "Mus' hev been Lar'bee an' Espey a-moonshinin'." Taft once more sought to prompt that inimical sense of injury. "An' moved the boulder bodaciously,--the corner landmark." "A felony," said Kenniston thoughtfully. The patter of the rain came heavily through the silence, and in that bleak whiteness without they heard far away the wind rousing from its lair in furthest denies. The terrors of its voice did not shake the mists; only the sound touched a responsive chord of feeling, and the day was the drearier for the broken stillness. "A felony," he said, and fell a-musing. He vaguely repudiated the idea, and then bethought himself, contradictorily, of the strange subterfuge with which he had been summoned to the door. For no harm, surely, he argued. There was a certain fascination in the thought of the new star that the mountaineer had brought to his contemplation. Not a bad face, this star-gazer's, and with a coloring which had always commended itself to his artistic sense. A good face and finely cut, he would have said but for that association of ideas, "a felony," that sudden conscious expression as of some guilty knowledge of the burning of the hotel. He could not believe it of his star-gazer, with his elated upward look! He remembered afterward that he thought then that the dankness of the weather, in relaxing all manner of tension, had slackened his rigid standards and his taut personal exactions. He was morally limp, doubtless, as well as physically; but he shrunk from the phrase in this application, and he considered that the most definite sensation of that most indefinite day was the relief he experienced when Rodolphus Ross came plunging out of the mists.