Katie was not going to miss her chance of finding out something. "I should want a guide who knew the territory," she said.

"I qualify," he replied shortly, with a short, unmirthful laugh. "That is one advantage of not having spent one's days on sunny paths." His voice on that was neither bashful nor boyish.

"But you must have spent some of them on sunny paths," she urged, with more feeling than she would have been able to account for. "You don't look," Katie added almost shyly, "as if you had grown in the dark."

He did not reply. He looked so much older when sternness set his face, leaving no hint of that teasing gleam in his eyes, that pleasing little humorous twist of his mouth.

Gently her voice went into the dark country claiming him then. "But you were telling me of my friend."

It brought him out, wondering anew. "Your friend! There you go again! How can you expect me to stick to a subject when paths open out on all sides of you like that? But I'll try to quit straying. It happened that on that day, just at that time, I was going under the south bridge. I chanced to look up. A face was bending down. Her face. Our eyes met--square. I _got_ it--flung to me in that one look. What the world had done to her--what she thought of it for doing it--what she meant to do about it.

"I wish," he went on, with a slow, heavy calm, "that the 'good' men and women of the world--those 'good' men and women who eat good dinners and sleep in good beds--some of the 'God's in heaven all's well with the world' people--could have that look wake them up in the middle of the night. I'd like to think of them turning to the wall and trying to shut it out--and the harder they tried the nearer and clearer it grew. I'd like to think of them sitting up in bed praying God--the God of 'good'

folks--to please make it stop. I'd like to have it haunt them--dog them--finally pierce their brains or souls or whatever it is they have, and begin to burrow. I'd like to have it right there on the job every time they mentioned the goodness of God or the justice of man, till finally they threw up their hands in crazed despair with, 'For God's sake, what do you want _me_ to do about it!'"

He had scarcely raised his voice. He was smiling at her. It was the smile led her to gasp: "Why I believe you hate us!"

"Why I really believe I do," he replied quietly, still smiling.

Suddenly she flared. "That's not the thing! You're not going to set the world right by hating the world. You're not going to make it right for some people by hating other people. What good thing can come of hate?"

"The greatest things have come of hate. Of a divine hate that transcends love."

"Why no they haven't! The greatest things have come of love. What the world needs is more love. You can't bring love by hating."

He seemed about to make heated reply, but smiled, or rather his smile became really a smile as he said: "What a lot of things you and I would find to talk about."

"We must--" Katie began impetuously, but halted and flushed. "We must go on with our story," was what it came to.

"I haven't any story, except just the story of that look. Though it holds the story of love and hate and a hundred other things you and I would disagree about. And I don't know that I can convey to you--you of the sunny paths--what the look conveyed to me. But imagine a crowd, a crazed crowd, all pushing to the center, and then in the center a face thrown back so you can see it for just an instant before it sinks to suffocation. If you can fancy that look--the last gasp for breath of one caught--squeezed--just going down--a hatred of the crowd that got her there, just to suffocate her--and perhaps one last wild look at the hills out beyond the crowd. If you can get _that_--that fear, suffocation, terror--and don't forget the hate--yet like the dog you've kicked that grieved--'How could you--when it was a pat I wanted!'--"

"I know it in the dog language," said Katie quiveringly.

"Then imagine the dog crazed with thirst tied just out of reach of a leaping, dancing brook--"

"Oh--please. That's too plain."

"It hurts when applied to dogs, does it?" he asked roughly.

"But they're so helpless--and they love us so!"

"And _they're_ so helpless--and they hate because they weren't let love."

"But surely there aren't many--such looks. Not many who feel they're--going down. Why such things couldn't _be_--in this beautiful world."

"Such," he said smilingly, "has ever been the philosophy of sunny paths."

"You needn't talk to me like that!" she retorted angrily. "I guess I saw the look as well as you did--and did a little more to banish it than you did, too."

"True. I was just coming to that thing of my not having done anything.

Perhaps it was a case of fools rushing in where angels feared to tread. You mustn't mind being called a fool in any sentence so preposterous as to call me an angel. You see one who had never been in the crowd would say--'Why don't you get out?' It would be droll, wouldn't it, to have some one on a far hill call--'But why don't you come over here?' Don't you see how that must appeal to the sense of humor of the one about to go down?"

She made no reply. The thing that hurt her was that he seemed to enjoy hurting her.

"You see I've been in the crowd," he said more simply and less bitterly.

"I don't suppose men who have been most burned to death ever say--'The fire can't hurt you.'"

"And do they never try to rescue others from fires?" asked Katie scornfully. "Do they let them burn--just because they know fire for a dangerous thing?"

"Rescue them for what? More fires? It's a question whether it's very sane, or so very humane, either, to rescue a man from one fire just to have him on hand for another."

"I don't think I ever in my life heard anything more farfetched,"

pronounced Katie. "How do you know there'll be another?"

"Because there are people for whom there's nothing else. If you can't offer a safe place, why rescue at all? Though it's true," he laughed, "that I hadn't the courage of my convictions in the matter. After that look--oh I haven't been able to make it live--burn--as it did--she passed on the Island, the guard evidently thinking she was with some people who had just got out of an automobile and gone on for a walk. And suddenly I was corrupted, driven by that impulse for saving life, that beautiful passion for keeping things alive to suffer which is so humorously grounded in the human race."

He stopped with a little laugh. Watching him, Katie was thinking one need have small fear of his not always being "corrupted." There was a light in his eyes spoke for "corruption."

"I saw her making straight across the Island," he went back to his story.

"I _knew_. And I knew that on the other side she might find things very conveniently arranged for her purpose. I turned the boat and went at its best speed around the head of the Island. Hugged the shore on your side.

Pulled into a little cove. Waited."

He looked at Katie, comparing her with an _a priori_ idea of her. "I saw you sitting up there in the sun--on the bunker. Just having received the last will and testament, as it were, of this other human soul, can't you fancy how I hated you--sitting there so serenely in the sun?"

"But why hate me?" she demanded passionately. "That's where you're small and unjust! I don't make the crazed crowds, do I?"

"Yes; that's just what you do. There'd be no crowds if it weren't for you. You take up too much room."

"I don't see why you want to--hurt me like that," she said unevenly.

"Don't you want me to enjoy my place any more? Will it do any good for me to get in the crowd? What can I do about it?"

Looking into her passionately earnest face it was perhaps the gulf between the girl and his _a priori_ idea of her brought the smile--a smile no kin to that hard smile of his. And looking with a different slant across the gulf there was a sort of affectionate roguery in his eyes as he asked: "Do you want to know what I honestly think about you?"

She nodded.

"I think you're in for it!"

"In for what?"

"I don't think you've the ghost of a chance to escape!" he gloated.

"Escape--what?"

"Seeing. And when you do--!" He laughed--that laugh one thinks of as the exclusive possession of an affectionate understanding. And when it died to a smile, something tenderly teasing flickered in that smile.

She flushed under it. "You were telling me--we keep stopping."

"Yes, don't we? I wonder if we always would."

"We keep stopping to quarrel."