In the morning Ray woke resolved to brace up against the nerveless suspense he had been in ever since he had left his manuscript with Mr. Brandreth, and go and present the letters that some people in Midland had given him to their friends in New York. At least he need not suffer from solitude unless he chose; he wondered if it would do to present his letters on Sunday. He breakfasted in this question. Shortly after he went back to his room, there was a knock at his door, and when he shouted “Come in!” it was set softly ajar, and Mr. Kane showed his face at the edge of it. “I suppose you know,” he said, ignoring Ray’s welcome, “or if you haven’t been out, you don’t know, that this is one of those Sunday mornings which make you feel that it has been blessed and hallowed above all the other days of the week. But I dare say,” he added, coming inside, “that the Mohammedans feel exactly so about a particularly fine Friday.” He glanced round the little room with an air of delicate impartiality, and asked leave to look from Ray’s window. As he put his head out, he said to the birds in the eaves, “Ah, sparrows!” as if he knew them personally, before he began to make compliments to the picturesque facts of the prospect. Then he stood with his back to Ray, looking down into the street, and praising the fashion of the shadow and sunshine in meeting so solidly there, at all sorts of irregular points and angles. Once he looked round and asked, with the sun making his hair all a shining silver: “Has any one else been shown this view? No? Then let me be the first to utter the stock imbecility that it ought to inspire you if anything could.” He put out his head again, and gave a glance upward at the speckless heaven, and then drew it in. “Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “a partially clouded sky is better for us, no doubt. Why didn’t you sit down with us last night? I saw that you wished to do so.” He faced Ray benignly, with a remote glimmer of mocking in his eye. Ray felt it safest to answer frankly. “Yes, I did want to join you awfully. I overheard a good deal you were saying where I was sitting, but I couldn’t accept your invitation. I knew it was a great chance, but I couldn’t.” “Don’t you know,” Mr. Kane asked, “that the chances have a polite horror of iteration? Those men and those moods may never be got together again. You oughtn’t to have thrown such a chance away!” “I know,” said Ray. “But I had to.” Mr. Kane leaned back in the chair he had taken, and murmured as if to himself: “Ah, youth, youth! Yes, it has to throw chances away. Waste is a condition of survival. Otherwise we should perish of mere fruition. But could you,” he asked, addressing Ray more directly, “without too much loss to the intimacies that every man ought to keep sacred, could you tell me just _why_ you had to refuse us your company?”