He stepped back and leaned against the iron fence. His face, under the street-lamps, was a very unhappy looking one. It carried a woebegone impassivity, the impassivity which implied he was so submerged in misery that no further blow could be of consequence to him. And yet, beyond the fixed pallor of that face there was something appealing, some trace of finer things, some touch which told me that he and the nocturnal underworld had nothing in common. "But are you getting used to the other thing?" I asked. "What other thing?" was his slow inquiry. I could see the twin fires of some dull fever burning in the depths of his cavernous eyes. "Going without sleep," I answered. For the second time he stared at me. "But I'm going to sleep," he answered. "I've got to!" "We all have to," I platitudinously remarked. "But there are times when we all don't." He laughed a curious little mirthless laugh. "Are you ever troubled that way?" he asked. We stood there facing each other, like two kindred ghosts communing amid the quietness of a catacomb. Then I laughed, but not so bitterly, I hope, as he had done. "I've walked this square," I told him, "a thousand times to your one." "I've been doing it here for the last three hours," he quietly confessed. "And it's done you up," I rejoined. "And what we both need is a quiet smoke and an hour or two with our feet up on something?" "That's very good of you," he had the grace to admit, as his gaze followed mine toward the house door. "But there are a number of things I've got to think out." He was a decent sort. There was no doubt of that. But it was equally plain that he was in a bad way about something or other. "Let's think it out together!" I had the boldness to suggest. He laughed mirthlessly, though he was already moving southward along the square with me as he began to speak again. "There is something I've got to think out alone," he told me. He spoke, this time without resentment, and I was glad of it. That unhappy-eyed youth had in some way got a grip, if not on my affection, at least on my interest. And in our infirmity we had a bond of sympathy. We were like two refugees pursued by the same bloodhounds and seeking the same trails of escape. I felt that I was violating no principle of reticence in taking him by the arm. "But why can't you slip in to my digs," I suggested, "for a smoke and a drop of Bristol Milk?" I was actually wheedling and coaxing him, as a stubborn child is coaxed. "Milk!" he murmured. "I never drink milk." "But, my dear man, Bristol Milk isn't the kind that comes from cows. It's seventy-year old sherry that's been sent on a sea-voyage to Australia and back. It's something that's oil to the throat and music to the senses!" He looked at me as though the whole width of a Hudson River flowed between us. "That sounds appealing," he acknowledged. "But I'm in a mess that even Bristol Milk won't wash me out of."