"Yes, sir; but you haven’t done it. That’s all I mean. I thought if I got here first—" It was easy to size him up as a vain little terrier, and my respectful manner softened him. He stood back for a minute to examine me. "You don’t look like a fellow that ’d be after this sort of a job. Does he, Bridget?" Bridget’s answer, though non-committal, was in my favor: "Sure I’ve seen ivery kind o’ man lookin’ for a job at one time or another. It’s not his looks that ’ll tell in handling rugs; it’s his boiceps." He tapped his own strong biceps to emphasize his observation, while I endeavored to explain. "You’re quite right, sir. You’d see that when lots of other men wouldn’t. As a matter of tact, this job or any other job would be new to me. I had some money—but the war’s got me stone-broke. I lived in France till just lately. "If you lived in France, why ain’t you fightin’?" Not having the same dread of inventing a tale as with Boyd Averill, I said, boldly: "I did fight, till they discharged me. Got a blow on the head, and wasn’t any good after that. I was with the French army because my people lived over there. When I got out of it, there was no provision made for me, of course. My father and mother had died, my father’s business had been smashed to pieces—" "What was he?" Luckily my imagination didn’t fail me. "An artist. He was just beginning to make a hit. I was to have been"—I sought for the most credible possibility—"an architect. I was to have studied at the Beaux Arts, that’s the big school for architects in Paris; but of course all that was knocked on the head when my father died, and so I sailed for New York." "Haven’t you got no relations here?" I remembered that Lydia Blair thought she might have seen me in Salt Lake City, but I was afraid of the Mormon connotation. "My family used to live in—in California; but they’re all scattered, and we’d been in Europe for so many years—" "Amur’cans should live in God’s country—" "Yes, sir; so I’ve found out. If we had, I shouldn’t be asking for a job in order to get a meal. I’m down to that," I confessed, showing him the nickel and the dime. He took a minute or two to reflect on the situation, saying, finally, with a little relenting in his tone: "There’s nine more rugs out in that lorry. If you help this man to lug them in you’ll get fifty cents." If it was not the miracle, it was a sign and a wonder none the less. Fifty cents would tide me over the night. I should have sixty-five cents in all, and it would be my own. I should not have cadged it from a woman, whatever the motive of her generosity. It was that motive which made me tremble. If it was what it might have been, if I was not a mere fatuous fool, then there was no hole so deep that I had better not hide in it, no distance so great that I had better not put it between her and me. It would wound her if I did, but on every count that would be preferable....