Outside, Phyllis looked at Allan and Allan looked at Phyllis. There didn't seem much to say about it. At last Allan spoke, in a way that he and Phyllis agreed afterwards was painfully inadequate, but was all he could think of to say. "Ah--would you like to put away your suitcase, old man?" he inquired. "You must be tired of--of seeing it there." Phyllis gurgled under her breath, but every one else was deadly serious. Nobody seemed to see anything funny about the offer. "Thank you very much," John responded solemnly. "Yes, thank you, Harrington, I believe I would." He bent over and picked it up, and followed his host inside. Neither of them said anything as they went upstairs. "Here's your room," Allan offered, showing it politely. "So it is," murmured John in a quite expressionless voice, looking at it without seeming to know how to enter. "It's to live in, you know," Allan suggested. At this broad hint John went in and put his suitcase on the bed. He still appeared to be in more or less of a trance-state. "If we'd known, we'd have tied a little white ribbon here and there, and arranged a rice-cascade--a shower, isn't it? or something," continued his host, amiably. "Awfully sorry, old chap, but you shouldn't have been so darn secretive. But we'll do our best--" John awoke at this, and caught up a small pink pincushion which sat in the mathematical middle of his dresser, and threw it. It didn't hit Allan, because he dodged. "That's one of Phyllis' favorite pincushions," he warned John from outside the door. "I say, Johnny, this isn't any way to repay hospitality." He went on down the stair, and John could see his shoulders shaking. "They've both got too confounded much sense of humor," said John bitterly. But he went out and picked up the pincushion just the same, and addressed himself to the methodical unpacking of his suitcase. "Oh, I forgot! Congratulations!" Allan called cheerily up from the stair-foot. John, casting collars automatically from suitcase to dresser-top, growled. "Congratulations! I need prayers more!" he said under his breath. "But--poor little thing! I might as well have stepped on a kitten! ... I certainly did tell her to hope for better things and they'd come.... I didn't know I was going to be one of 'em!" Then, as he continued to unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for a meal in the jungle: _"The trustful Tiger closed his prayer-- Behold--a Brahmin trembling there! The Brahmin never scoffed a whit. The Prayer had answer_.--He _was_ It." "I wonder," mused John, "whether she's a kitten, or a tiger? Anyway, _I_ was _It_! ... I can't stand any more of anything just now. I'll get out till dinner-time!"