It was dark when they arrived at the huts; the fires were sodden mats of black ash; no one was visible. They stumbled from shelter to shelter, but found them full. One at last was discovered unoccupied; but they had no sooner entered than the reason was sharply borne upon them--the roof leaked to such an extent that the floor was an uneasy sheet of mud. However, there was literally nowhere else for them to go. Janin found a broken chair on which he balanced his bowed and shrunken form; Harry Baggs sat against the wall. He dozed uneasily, and, wakened by the old man's babbling, cursed him bitterly. At last he fell asleep; but, brought suddenly back to consciousness by a hand gripping his shoulder, he started up in a blaze of wrath. He shook off the hand and heard French Janin slip and fall against an insecure wall. The interior was absolutely black; Harry Baggs could see no more than his blind companion. The latter fumbled, at last regained a footing, and his voice fluctuated out of an apparent nothingness. “There is something important for you to know,” Janin proceeded. “I lied to you about your voice--I, once a musician of the orchestra at the Opéra Comique. I meant to be cunning and take you round to the fairs, where we would make money; have you sing truck for people who know nothing. I let you sing to-day, in the rain, for a dollar--while I, Janin, fiddled. “I am a _voyou_; there is nothing in English low enough. The thought of it has been eating at me like a rat.” The disembodied words stopped, the old man strangled and coughed; then continued gasping: “Attention! You have a supreme barytone, a miracle! I heard all the great voices for twenty years, and know. “At times there is a voice with perfect pitch, a true art and range; not many--they are cold. At times there is a singer with great heart, sympathy ... mostly too sweet. “But once, maybe, in fifty, sixty years, both are together. You are that--I make you amends.” The rain pounded fantastically on the roof a few inches above Harry Baggs' head and the water seeped coldly through his battered shoes; but, in the violent rebirth of the vague glow he had lost a short while before, he gave no heed to his bodily discomfort. “A supreme barytone!” The walls of the hut, the hollow, dissolved before the sudden light of hope that enveloped him; all the dim dreams, the unformulated aspirations on which subconsciously his spirit had subsisted, returned. “Can you be sure?” he demanded uncertainly. “Absolutely! You are an artist, and life has wrung you out like a cloth--jail, hungry, outcast; yes, and nights with stars, and water shining; men like old Janin, dead men, begging on the roads--they are all in your voice, jumbled--serious barytone----” The high thin recital stopped, from exhaustion. Harry Baggs was warm to the ends of his fingers. He wiped his wet brow with a wetter hand. “That's fine,” he said impotently; “fine!”