A look of utter incredulity showed upon the listener's face. "Do you mean to tell me--" he blurted out. "That I ask you to be my good Samaritan? Yes." The stranger's face became suddenly vindictive. "Vaseline!" he cried. "A pennyworth," said Charnock, again offering the penny. The man of the agreeable countenance struck Charnock's hand violently aside, and the penny flew into a gutter. He stood up on the step and thrust his face, which was now inflamed with fury, into the cab. "I tell you what," he cried, "you are a fair red-hotter, you are. Buy you vaseline! I hope your finger will petrify. I hope you'll just sit in that cab and rot away in your boots, until you have to ante up in kingdom come." He added expletives to his anathema. "Really," said Charnock, "if I was a lady I don't think that I should like to listen to you any longer." But before Charnock had finished the sentence, the good Samaritan, who was no Samaritan at all, had flung himself from the cab and was striding up the street. "After all," thought Charnock, "I might just as well have driven across to the chemist, if I had only thought of it." This he now did, got his finger free, cashed his draft, and took the train to London. During this journey the discourteous stranger occupied some part of his thoughts. Between Charnock's eyes and the newspaper, against the red cliffs of Teignmouth, on the green of the home counties, his face obtruded, and for a particular reason. The marks of fear are unmistakable. The man whom he had called, had been scared by the call, nor had his fear quite left him when he had come face to face with Charnock. Set features which strove to conceal, and a brightness of the eye which betrayed emotion, these things Charnock remembered very clearly. In London he dined alone at his hotel, and over against him the stranger's face bore him company. He went out afterwards into the street, and amidst the myriad ringing feet, was seized with an utter sense of loneliness, more poignant, more complete, than he had ever experienced in the waste places of the world. The lights of a theatre attracted him. He paid his money, took a seat in the stalls, and was at once very worried and perplexed. He turned to his neighbour, who was boisterously laughing. "Would you mind telling me what this play is?" he asked. "Oh, it's a musical comedy." "I see. But what is it about?" Charnock's neighbour scratched his head thoughtfully. "I ought to remember," he said, "for I saw the piece early in the run." Charnock went out, crossed a street, and came to another theatre, where he saw a good half of the tragedy of _Macbeth_. Thence he returned to his hotel and went to bed.