He went on down the stair, and John could see his shoulders shaking.
"They've both got too confounded much sense of humor," said John bitterly.
But he went out and picked up the pincushion just the same, and addressed himself to the methodical unpacking of his suitcase.
"Oh, I forgot! Congratulations!" Allan called cheerily up from the stair-foot.
John, casting collars automatically from suitcase to dresser-top, growled.
"Congratulations! I need prayers more!" he said under his breath. "But—poor little thing! I might as well have stepped on a kitten! ... I certainly did tell her to hope for better things and they'd come.... I didn't know I was going to be one of 'em!"
Then, as he continued to unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for a meal in the jungle:
"The trustful Tiger closed his prayer—
Behold—a Brahmin trembling there!
The Brahmin never scoffed a whit.
The Prayer had answer.—He was It."
"I wonder," mused John, "whether she's a kitten, or a tiger? Anyway, I was It! ... I can't stand any more of anything just now. I'll get out till dinner-time!"
He tiptoed downstairs, and in his turn slid out the back door. The Haveniths were still talking to the Harringtons on the front veranda, he noted with a certain pleasure in their durance, and Phyllis' back looked polite but tired. He headed for the adjacent woods, diving into the leafy coolness with a feeling of escape. The wood blew cool and a little moist, and fragrant with far-off wood-smoke, and there was a feeling of solitude that he liked. He sighed with relief as he rounded the turn in the wood-path.