I-XXII

The room was singularly bare: a tin lamp
with a green glass shade, on an uncovered
deal table, illuminated an open book, wood
chairs with roughly split, hickory backs, a couch
with no covering over its wire springs and iron
frame; there was no carpet on the floor of loosely
grooved boards, no decorations on the plastered
walls save a dark engraving of a man in intricate
armor, with a face as passionate, as keen, as relentless,
as a hawk's, labelled, "Loyola."

Merlier silently indicated a chair, but he remained
standing with his gaze lowered upon the
floor. He was a burly man, with a heavy countenance
impassive as an oriental's, out of which,
startling in its unexpected rapidity, a glance flashed
and stabbed as steely as Loyola's sword. His
hands were clasped before him; they were, in that
environment, strangely white, and covered with the
scars of what, patently, were unaccustomed employments.

"It feels good inside," Gordon observed tritely.
He noted uneasily the muddy tracks his shoes had

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