Jim Stainton, with suspended breath, drew the hanging electric-lamp nearer, leaned forward and studied the reflection of that face closely.
He saw a large, well-proportioned head, the head of a man serious, perhaps, but admirably poised. The black hair was only sparsely sprinkled with gray. The deep line between the thick brows might be the furrow of concentration rather than the mark of years. The rugged features—earnest eyes of steel, strong nose, compressed lips and square, clean-shaven chin—were all features that, whatever the life they had faced, betokened stamina from the beginning. Hot suns had burnished his cheeks, but a hard career had entailed those abstinences which are among the surest warders of youth. Experience had strengthened, but time had been kind.
"I am still young," he thought. "I am fifty, but I don't look forty, and I have the physique of twenty-five."
He walked to the window and flung it wide.
Below him swirled the yellow evening life of the third greatest among the world's great thoroughfares. Looking down from the height of his hotel was to Stainton like looking down upon a riverside furnace through its roof. Molten streams, swelling from the darker channels to the north, flowed along their appointed alleyways and broke and divided, hissing and spluttering against the pier that was the Times Building. And as the steam rises from the red waste that runs from the furnace into the river, there now rose to Stainton's desert-starved ears the clanging of cable-cars, the rattle of carriages, the tooting of the purring motors—all the humming chorus of the night-wakeful thing that men call New York.
He stretched his arms apart to it. He wanted to enfold it, to inhale its breath, to mix with it and become lost in it. He had come back. After all these years, he had come back, and he had come back a victor unscarred.
"I'm still young," he repeated, raising his head and spreading his nostrils to the damp air of the city-evening. And "Still young!" he continued to whisper on his way down in the elevator and through the crowded dining-room to his seat at a glittering table.
A ready waiter detached himself from a group of his fellows and dexterously steered a rapid course, between seated diners and laden serving-tables, to Stainton's broad shoulder.
Stainton was studying, with less difficulty than he had anticipated, the menu.
"Soup, sir?" suggested the waiter.