Again his will curbed his treacherous tongue, and, walking to the doorway, he stood for a moment, looking out; then he fiercely snarled: "Oh, God, how I hate it all--how I hate myself! I am going mad with this life! The squeak of these shadowy conies, the twitter of these unseen little birds, go on day by day. They'll drive me mad! If you had not come to-night I could not have slept--I would have gone to the mill, and that means drink to me--drink and oblivion. You came and saved me. I feared you--hated you then; now I bless you." Once more he seemed to answer an unspoken query: "I have no people. My mother is dead, my father has disowned me--he does not even know I am alive. I'm the black devil of the family--but I shall go back--" His face was working with passion, and though he took a seat opposite his guest, his hands continued to flutter aimlessly and his head moved restlessly from side to side. "I don't know why I am telling all this to you," he went on after a pause. "I reckon it's because of the weakness of the thirst that is coming over me. Some time I'll go down to those hell-holes at the mills and never come back--the stuff they sell to me is destructive as fire--it is poison! You're a man of substance, I can see that--you're no hobo like most of the fellows out here--that's why I'm talking to you. You remind me of some one I know. There's something familiar in your eyes." The man with the beard struck the ashes from his pipe and began scraping it. "There is always a woman in these cases," he critically remarked. The miner took this simple statement as a challenging question. His excitement visibly increased, but he did not at once reply. He talked on aimlessly, incoherently, struggling like a small animal in a torrent. He rose at last, and as he stood in the doorway, breathing deeply, his face livid in the sunset light, the muscles of his jaw trembled. The stranger observed his host's agitation, but put away his pipe with slow and steady hand. He said nothing, and yet an observer would have declared he held the other and weaker man in the grasp of an inexorable hypnotic silence. Finally he fixed a calm, cold glance upon his host, as if summoning him to answer. "Yes," the miner confessed, "there is always a woman in the case--another and more fortunate man. The woman is false, the man is treacherous. You trust and they betray. Such beings ruin and madden--they make outlaws such as I am--" "Love is above will," asserted the millwright, with decision. The other man fiercely turned. "I know what you mean--you mean the woman is not to be condemned--that love goes where it is drawn. That is true, but deceit is not involuntary--it is deliberate--" "Sometimes we deceive ourselves." "In her case it was deceit," retorted the miner, who was now so deeply engaged with his own story that each general observation on the part of his guest was taken to be specific and personal.