Weeks passed by, and as Gavin was not sick enough to need care, we had little to do with him, and that little did not encourage us to go further. Often a word of greeting, in passing, will call forth something more, but his cold, forbidding manner, joined to a certain distant politeness, so repelled me, that I resolved to let him alone; and yet I felt sorry for him, for I could not fail to notice his unpopularity among the men. He walked alone, mentally and physically, and seemed to desire no intercourse with any one. One morning I found him gloomily seated in a corner of the ward, apparently unconscious of everything around him. “What a terribly long face,” said I, trying to rally him; “you will never get well till you learn to laugh.” “To laugh!” said he, with intense bitterness; “then I am invalided for life. Little enough is there on earth to laugh about, I think;” and rising hastily, he brushed past me, and left the ward. “I don’t like that Gavin,” I said to M., “there’s something so dark and hard about him; I can’t make him out.” “Ah! no story yet? I thought he was to have a romantic story, with his interesting dark eyes.” “Story! He never opens his lips to any one; and unless he shall need something, I have almost determined never to open mine to him again.” Such was the man whom I have left all this time lying upon the staircase. Knowing as I did that whatever his faults might be, intemperance was not one of them, I once more address him; he evidently has not heard me before, for, starting up hastily, and forgetting his usual politeness, he exclaims, petulantly, “I thought I could be to myself here, at least.” “So you can, as far as I am concerned; I merely came up stairs on an errand, without an idea that you were here; but another time when you wish to secure perfect privacy, I should scarcely advise you to choose a staircase.” “It matters little,” said he, sitting down on the stairs, resting his elbows on his knees, and burying his face in his hands, “one part of the world or another; it’s all the same; dark enough to wish to be well out of it.” “Gavin,” said I, sitting down on the stair beside him, “do you remember that you told me how terribly your back ached from carrying your knapsack and blanket on that long march?” A dull, uninterested assent. “What would have been most welcome, when the pain became intolerable?” “To unload, of course;” his head still buried in his hands. “At times, in the long march of life, I have borne a heavy, moral knapsack; and when the pain from its weight became intolerable, no words can tell the relief of unloading, and sharing the burden with some loving heart, with whom it was as safe and as sacred as with myself. Your heart, just now, is aching worse than ever did your back; might it not ease it to try the experiment?” He raised his head quickly; fire enough in those eyes then.