Chalender, perhaps remembering too, shivered, rose, and went to the fireplace, thrusting his hands out, and washing them in the warm air as he mumbled: “Many’s the cold night I’ve stood by the camp fire and tried to get my hands warm. That’s the only sign of my age, Davie: it’s hard to keep my hands warm. They’re half frozen all the time.” He did not note that RoBards made no comment. He was thinking of that circle in Dante’s Inferno where the damned lie imbedded in ice. But Chalender glanced down at the hearthstone and asked: “Isn’t that the marble I brought over from Sing Sing when I was an engineer on the aqueduct? Why, I believe it is! There was a poem I started to write. I have always been a poet at heart, Davie, plucking the lyre with hands all thumbs, trying to make life rhyme and run to meter. But I had no gift of words. “I spent half a night and fifteen miles trying to write a poem to go with that slab. It ran something like—like—ah, I have it!— “Marble, marble, I could never mould you To the beauteous image of my love, So keep the blissful secret that I told you Tell it only to— “And there I stuck and couldn’t get on to save me.” He bent his arm along the mantel and laid his forehead on it as he said with an unusual absence of flippancy: “I loved her, Davie. You stole her from me when I was dying. You ran away with her to this place. When I called for her and they told me she had married you, my heart died. I got well. My body got well. But my soul was always sick. I laughed and pretended, flirted and reveled, but I never loved anybody else—only Patty—always only Patty. “And she—when she was afraid of life or death, she ran to you; but when she wasn’t afraid of life——” As he struck his chest and opened his mouth to proceed, RoBards yelled: “You say it and I’ll kill you!” “You—kill anybody?” Chalender sneered, and RoBards sneered again: “Oh, I’ve killed one or two in my day.” Chalender apparently did not hear this mad brag, for he was bragging on his own account: “You couldn’t kill me; nor could ten men like you. Thousands have tried to kill me. For four years the Rebels kept shooting at me and whacking at me with their sabers, jabbing with their bayonets and searching for me with grape and canister, but I didn’t die. It seems I shall never die. Maybe that’s because I’ve never quite lived. I loved Patty and you got her. You oughtn’t to be hurt to learn that another man loved your love. But if it makes you mad to hear me say it, maybe you could kill me. Then my blood would run out on this marble that I brought to her when she was young and pretty. Oh, but she was pretty, a pretty thing, a sweet thing. What a damned, ugly world, to let a pretty thing like Patty Jessamine suffer and die! “Oh, Davie, Davie, what a darling she was, in what a dirty world!”