I might not take more than that one drink during that afternoon; but I knew it would be a beginning. I should come back again; and I should come back again after that. Another type of man would do nothing of the kind; but I was my own type. Very deliberately I said good-by to the world I had known for the past three years and more. I said good-by to work, to ambition, to salvation, to country, to love. Back, far back in my mind I was saying the same deliberate good-by to God. I shouldn’t rest now till everything was gone. The glass was still untasted on the table. I was taking my time. The farewells on which I was engaged couldn’t be hurried. The fate in store for me would wait. Then the door behind which I sat began to open. It opened slowly, timidly, stealthily, as if the person entering was afraid to come in. The action stirred the curiosity, and I watched. Before I saw a face I saw a hand. Rather, I saw four fingers from the knuckles to the nails, as if some one was steadying himself by the sheer force of holding on. They were old, thin, twisted fingers, and I knew at a glance I had seen them before. The door continued to open, stealthily, timidly, slowly; and then, looking like a spirit rather than a man—a neat, respectable spirit wearing a silver star in his buttonhole, with trembling hands and a woeful quiver to the corner of his lower lip—Lovey stood in the barroom. He stood as if he had never been in any such place before. He was like a visitant from some other sphere—dazed, diaphanous, unearthly. He didn’t look at the table behind the door. His gaze was far off. I could see it scanning the backs of the hangers across the bar. Then it went over the tables one by one, traveling nearer and nearer. Just before the dim eyes reached me I said: “Hello, Lovey! Come and sit down. What’ll you have to drink?” There seemed to be an interval between hearing my voice and actually seeing me—an interval during which a frosty, unnatural color, as if snow were suddenly to take fire, flared in his waxlike cheek. But he came to the table and dropped into a round-backed chair. “Oh, Slim!” Leaning on the table, he covered his face with his hand. I tried putting up a bluff. “What’s the matter, Lovey? Haven’t got a headache, have you?” He raised those pitiful, dead blue eyes. “No, but I’ve got a ’eartache, Slim—a ’eartache I won’t never get over.” “Why, why—” I began to rally him. “It’s just what I was afeared of—for days and days I’ve been afeared of it. Been a-watchin’ of you, I ’ave.” Here was another transmigrated soul that had traveled farther than I knew. It was in pure curiosity as to the changes wrought in him that I said: “I should think you would have been glad, Lovey. When I was here before you used to want to have us both go back.” The extinct eyes were raised on me. “These times ain’t them times. Everything different. I ’aven’t stayed where I was in them days, not any more nor you. Oh, to think, to think!” “To think what?”