Drawing out the special paper, he looked at the heading and smiled. "Letters to Nobody." He took a fresh sheet and began to write. Through the night he wrote and dreamed and dozed and wrote again. When a sound of song, faint and sweet and imminent, roused him to lift his sleep-bowed head from the desk upon which it had sunk, the gray, soiled light of a stormy morning was in his eyes. The last words he had written were: "The breast of the world rises and falls with your breathing." Banneker was twenty-four years old, and had the untainted soul of a boy of sixteen. CHAPTER V Overhead she was singing. The voice was clear and sweet and happy. He did not know the melody; some minor refrain of broken rhythm which seemed always to die away short of fulfillment. A haunting thing of mystery and glamour, such mystery and glamour as had irradiated his long and wonderful night. He heard the door open and then her light footsteps on the stair outside. Hot-eyed and disheveled, he rose, staggering a little at first as he hurried to greet her. She stood poised on the lower step. "Good-morning," he said. She made no return to his accost other than a slow smile. "I thought you were a dream," she murmured. "No. I'm real enough. Are you better? Your head?" She put a hand to the bandage. "It's sore. Otherwise I'm quite fit. I've slept like the dead." "I'm glad to hear it," he replied mechanically. He was drinking her in, all the grace and loveliness and wonder of her, himself quite unconscious of the intensity of his gaze. She accepted the mute tribute untroubled; but there was a suggestion of puzzlement in the frown which began to pucker her forehead. "You're really the station-agent?" she asked with a slight emphasis upon the adverb. "Yes. Why not?" "Nothing. No reason. Won't you tell me what happened?" "Come inside." He held open the door against the wind. "No. It's musty." She wrinkled a dainty nose. "Can't we talk here? I love the feel of the air and the wet. And the world! I'm glad I wasn't killed." "So am I," he said soberly. "When my brain wouldn't work quite right yesterday, I thought that some one had hit me. That isn't so, is it?" "No. Your train was wrecked. You were injured. In the confusion you must have run away." "Yes. I remember being frightened. Terribly frightened. I'd never been that way before. Outside of that one idea of fear, everything was mixed up. I ran until I couldn't run any more and dropped down." "And then?" "I got up and ran again. Have you ever been afraid?" "Plenty of times." "I hadn't realized before that there was anything in the world to be afraid of. But the thought of that blow, coming so suddenly from nowhere, and the fear that I might be struck again--it drove me." She flung out her hands in a little desperate gesture that twitched at Banneker's breath. "You must have been out all night in the rain."' "No. I found a sort of cabin in the woods. It was deserted."