Stealthily, as if he were afraid of some tangible shape reaching out of the silence, his hand went to the telephone receiver. He clutched it as drowning fingers clutch at seaweed. He leaned and jerked the receiver to his ear, and waited for the human voice that would bring him once more into the world of men. He did not know then that the telephone was the kind that must be rung by the user; or if he had been told that he had forgotten. So he waited, his ears strained to catch the heavenly sound of a human voice. Shame crept in on the panic of his soul; shame and something that stiffened it into the courage of a man. He felt his cheeks burn with the flush that stained them, and he slowly lowered the receiver into its hook. With his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his mouth pulled down at the corners, he stood leaning back against the desk shelf and forced himself to look down across the wooded slopes to the valley, where a light twinkled now like a fallen star. After a while he found that he could see once more the beauty, and not so much the loneliness. Then, just to prove to himself that he was not going to be bluffed by the silence, he began to whistle. And the tune carried with it an impish streak of that grim humor in which, so they tell us, the song was born. It is completely out of date now, that song, but then it was being sung around the world. And sometimes it was whistled just as Jack was whistling it now, to brace a man's courage against the press of circumstances. "It's a long way to Tipperary," sang Jack, when he had whistled the chorus twice; and grinned at the joke upon himself. After that he began to fuss with the oil stove and to experiment with the food they had left him, and whistled deliberately all the while. In this wise Jack Corey lost himself from his world and entered into his exile on a mountain top. CHAPTER SIX MISS ROSE FORWARD Times were none too prosperous with the Martha Washington Beauty Shop, upon the sixth floor of a Broadway building. In the hairdressing parlor half the long rows of chairs reached out empty arms except during the rush hours of afternoon; even then impatient patrons merely sprinkled the room with little oases of activity while the girls busied themselves with tidying shelves already immaculate, and prinking before the mirrors whenever they dared. An air of uncertainty pervaded the place, swept in by the rumor that the shop was going to cut down its force of operators. No one knew, of course, the exact truth of the matter, but that made it all the worse. "'For one shall be taken and the other left,'" a blonde girl quoted into a dismal little group at the window that looked out over the city. "Has any one heard any more about it?"