But the old man wanted to plunge at once into his own story. He talked, saying sad discouraged words, while his eyes kept smiling with a peculiar appealing little smile. “If the words uttered by my lips annoy or bore you, do not pay any attention to them. I am really a jolly fellow although I am an old man, and not of much use any more,” the eyes were saying. The eyes were pale blue and watery. How strange to see them set in the head of an old man. They belonged in the head of a lost dog. The smile was not really a smile. “Don’t kick me, young fellow. If you can’t give me anything to eat, scratch my head. At least show you are a fellow of good intentions. I’ve been kicked about quite enough.” It was so very evident the eyes were speaking a language of their own. Will found himself smiling sympathetically. It was true there was something dog-like in the little old man and Will was pleased with himself for having so quickly caught the sense of him. “One who can see things with his eyes will perhaps get along all right in the world, after all,” he thought. His thoughts wandered away from the old man. In Bidwell there was an old woman lived alone and owned a shepherd dog. Every summer she decided to cut away the dog’s coat, and then—at the last moment and after she had in fact started the job—she changed her mind. Well, she grasped a long pair of scissors firmly in her hand and started on the dog’s flanks. Her hand trembled a little. “Shall I go ahead, or shall I stop?” After two minutes she gave up the job. “It makes him look too ugly,” she thought, justifying her timidity. Later the hot days came, the dog went about with his tongue hanging out and again the old woman took the scissors in her hand. The dog stood patiently waiting but, when she had cut a long wide furrow through the thick hair of his back, she stopped again. In a sense, and to her way of looking at the matter, cutting away his splendid coat was like cutting away a part of himself. She couldn’t go on. “Now there—that made him look worse than ever,” she declared to herself. With a determined air she put the scissors away, and all summer the dog went about looking a little puzzled and ashamed. Will kept smiling and thinking of the old woman’s dog and then looked again at his companion of the train. The variegated suit the old man wore gave him something of the air of the half-sheared shepherd dog. Both had the same puzzled, ashamed air. Now Will had begun using the old man for his own ends. There was something inside himself that wanted facing, he didn’t want to face—not yet. Ever since he had left home, in fact ever since that day when he had come home from the country and had told Kate of his intention to set out into the world, he had been dodging something. If one thought of the little old man, and of the half-sheared dog, one did not have to think of oneself.