“I’ve already asked too much of you. I’m sorry,” he added ingenuously. “One can’t force his things through this way. Why, I’d have given the whole six stories to _The Public Square_ for a hundred dollars, and taken the cheapening that comes to an author from a trick like that. That’s how I needed an answer.” He had glanced up at the light as he spoke, a white, haggard smile, that bloodless look around the mouth. Pity caught and controlled her. She had done him an injustice already. “You spoke of leaving New York for the west,” she said. He laughed and shrugged, palms held upward. “How far? I mean where is your home?” He pointed to his cap lying on the arm of a chair, as if to say that were his home. “I’ve got an aunt in Cleveland who wants me,” he added. “A little quiet house away out on one of the cross streets off Euclid, where there’s a room and eats and a place to write. I’ll start to walk, I guess.” “Where are you staying in New York?” He was laughing at her. “A little den up in Union Square--just a skylight. It’s a cell, Miss Musser, and even there, I have to stay out until midnight to sneak in without meeting the landlady.... Did you ever sleep in a room that had no window?” “Mine has a window,” Pidge said. “Then this isn’t yours?” He pointed to the closed folding doors of the inner room. “Oh, no. Mine’s up higher, but it has a window. This is just a sitting room we sometimes use--Miss Claes and I--the lodger being away.” “Oh,” he said queerly; then added with his haggard smile: “So the color was put on too thick--that’s too bad.” “Does Mr. Higgins know that you have been over there in Tunis?” Pidge asked. “I figured he would, but maybe he will decide, as you did, that I sat here in New York and stabbed at that setting.” “I’ll place the story before him to-morrow. I could say to him that you’ve been to the desert----” “Oh, I wouldn’t. Don’t tell him that. I was hoping, though, that you could tell him you liked it.” Pidge now looked up into a smile almost childlike in its eager purpose. “Couldn’t you tell him that? Couldn’t you tell him that--just for what others may find in the story?” The catch was in her throat again. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder; his smile was altogether disarming in its wistfulness. She thought he couldn’t mean what he said. She thought of the face in the baby carriage in Santa Monica; of this tortured child of whims and imaginations, in a room with no window, and the pallor around his mouth. She didn’t like any of it, but did not feel exactly separate from it. She thought of a little box upstairs in her own room, of the check her father had sent, which she had so far refused to cash. She was in a blur, her sense of belonging to Melton’s dilemma over all.