Miss Saxon smiled: "Mrs. Carter told me how you and Mark went to help a man on the
mountain. It was nice of you Billy."

"Oh! that!" said Billy scornfully, rallying to screen his
agitation, "Oh, he's better. He got up and went home. Oh, it wasn't
nothing. I just went and helped Cart. Sorry not to get back to Sunday
School Saxy, but I didn't think 'twould take so long."

After that most unusual explanation, conversation languished, while
Billy consumed the final waffle, after which he remarked gravely that
if she didn't mind he'd go to bed. He paused at the foot of the stair
with a new thoughtfulness to ask if she wanted any wood brought in for
morning, and she cried all the time she was washing up the few dishes
at his consideration of her. Perhaps, as Mrs. Severn had told her,
there was going to come a change and Billy was really growing more
manly.

Billy, as he made his brief preparation for bed told himself that he
couldn't sleep, he had too much to worry about and dope out, but his
head had no more than touched the pillow till he was dead to the world.
Whatever came on the morrow, whatever had happened the day before,
Billy had to sleep it out before he was fit to think. And Billy slept.

But up the street in the Carter house a light burned late in Mark's
window, and Mark himself, his mother soothed and comforted and sent to
sleep, sat up in his big leather chair that his mother had given him on
the last birthday before he left home, and stared at the wall opposite
where hung the picture of a little girl in a white dress with floating
hair and starry eyes. In his face there grew a yearning and a
hopelessness that was beyond anything to describe. It was like a face
that is suffering pain of fire and studying to be brave, yet burns and
suffers and is not consumed. That was the look in Mark Carter's eyes
and around his finely chiseled lips. Once, when he was in that mood
travelling on a railway carriage, a woman across the aisle had called
her husband's attention to him. "Look at that man!" she said, "He looks
like a lost soul!"