He looked carefully at the fireplace, where logs were piled ready for lighting over a heap of brushwood and crumpled wrapping paper. Then he regarded the center table, on which stood the Venetian goblet, the caraffe, and the bottle filled with the medicine prescribed by Dr. Fallows. In the expiring daylight Hamoud, motionless in his robes, loomed paler than usual, his handsome face very grave. The piano attracted his attention. In the shadows it had the aspect of a squatting monster that bared at him the teeth of its wide mouth. As if he had been awaiting this grotesque effect of challenge, he moved toward the hazy windows, and began to curtain them. David murmured listlessly: "Has the doctor gone?" Hamoud gave a slight start. With his hand on the last window curtain, he inclined his head, listening in awe to the tremor of that voice. When he had passed his tongue over his lips he responded: "Yes." He drew the last curtain slowly. As he did so, his visage, sharpened by the dying light, was turned toward David; his gemlike lips, without parting, seemed to say, "Look! it is the world of sky and trees, of sunrise and noon, sunset and night, that I am shutting out." The study lay in darkness. Through this darkness Hamoud moved silently toward the center table. He tweaked the lamp cord: a gush of mellow rays leaped out to cover the scattered piles of manuscript, the Venetian goblet, the bottle of medicine. Hamoud moved the wheel chair closer to these objects, so that David by reaching forth his hand might touch them if he wished. Then, after stepping back to consider this arrangement with a strained look, he went to the fireplace, lighted a match, blew it out, and laid it on the hearth. David stared at him. "You have not lighted the fire. It is cold tonight." Again Hamoud listened in awe to the sound of that voice. "It is cold," he assented softly, with a shiver. Still kneeling on the hearth, he contemplated the other as though he were seeing him now for the first time. The feeble, romantic face before him was not so pallid as his face; those enlarged, questioning eyes were not so strange as his eyes. At that stare of undefined alarm he felt, despite all his jealousy, contempt, and hatred, a twinge of weakness; he remembered all the other's helpless attitudes that he had sustained and eased. Of a sudden the habit of protection grappled with his resolve, and might have conquered, for a time at any rate, had he not recalled the sufferings of the beloved. He rose and approached the wheel chair. The newspaper was in his left hand, half concealed, like a weapon, in the folds of his robe. He heard a feeble cry: "What has happened? What has happened?" "And I who have eaten his bread," thought Hamoud, in sudden shame and horror. If only some one would come! But the shadowy perspective of the living room remained empty; and there was nowhere any sound except the beating of his heart.