This was a story of the Tunisian sands, written, she decided, by one who hadn’t been there; one who saw the desert as the average American reader would expect, but with additional flatfooted bits of color tramped down with audacity. Moonlight was different in Tunisia, and morals were different--freer than here. There was the glitter of the snake’s eye through the pages, for Pidge Musser. It made her think of a sick man in a gorgeous robe. She had inferred from Melton’s talk that this story was new; in fact, that it was still hot from his machine. Yet the manuscript didn’t feel new; the front and back pages showed wear. Could she have misunderstood?... It had freedom; not the freedom of ignorance, but the freedom of a drifting ship. Its anchor dragged, its compass was uncentered. It cried out, “My God, I am free!” and it was, as a derelict is free. At a quarter of ten, she heard the bell in the basement hall; heard Miss Claes directing Melton to the next floor. Pidge would not have had it this way, but people of the house were in the basement. He came up out of the dim stairway, walking wide, his soft cap crumpled in his hand, elbows out. He must have learned her name from Miss Claes. “You mustn’t think, Miss Musser, that I don’t know how much I am asking--this favor of yours to-night.” There was a sort of lift and draw to the way he took her hand; at the same time his shoulders and head bent down upon her. This thing that he was playing to-night was college boy--clumsy subtlety of a big boy coming home and greeting his sister--seeing in her, at the moment of greeting, something of the charm other boys might see. He walked around her under the light, laughing, apologizing, making a humorous picture of his own tension at _The Public Square_ that afternoon. “I went there like an anarchist,” he laughed. “I was prepared to get my answer or blow up the place. I had to laugh afterwards the way I seized upon you.” “I read the Tunis story,” she said. “Of course, you know it’s really unimportant what I think. I liked it well enough, but wasn’t carried away. I felt the color; in fact, color is the main asset of the story, but it seemed a bit thick----” He laughed aloud. He was bending to her again, and most benignly, college big brother still in his manner and voice. “I could tone that down, of course. The trouble is to get a thing like that straight, when you know that part of Africa as I do. I ought to have kept off Tunis, that’s the truth of it.” “You have really been there?” “That’s the worst of it, Miss Musser,” he laughed. “I went through hell for that story. Too much feeling to write with, you understand.” Pidge was awed at her own error. She had been so convinced that the color was faked that she had judged the whole story on that basis.