Loring sat on the edge of his cot, and smoked slowly while he watched Baird unpack his valise, and with the method of an orderly nature put everything away in the rough chest of drawers, or on the black iron hooks which protruded from the wall. Espying a tin of expensive tobacco neatly packed amidst a circle of collars, Stephen pounced upon it, and knocking out the contents of his pipe, proceeded to fill it with the new mixture. Radlett finished his unpacking, and recovering the tobacco can from Loring, filled his own pipe. Then he tipped a chair back against the wall, and sitting in it, regarded Loring for a moment in silence.
“Stephen,” he remarked after a few seconds, “you have done a good piece of work. I knew that you would.”
Loring’s irrelevant answer was to the effect that the tobacco which he had stolen was good. It was an odd characteristic of this man that though his nature contained many streaks of vanity, praise for work which he knew was good embarrassed him. At length he began to appreciate the ungraciousness of his response to Radlett’s advances, and leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, he said: “You cannot guess what it means to me, Baird, to have you say things like that, to be patted on the back and made to feel as if I had done something, and that by a man who has succeeded in everything to which he has turned his hand, who has won all the big prizes of life.”
Radlett drew back into the shadow where the lamplight could not reveal the expression of his face.
“All the prizes in life?” he queried with scornful emphasis. “No, not all by a damn sight. You see, Stephen, I feel as if Fate had stood over me with a deuced ironical smile, and said: ‘You shall have your every wish in life—except the one thing that you want most of all—the one thing that would make you happy.’”
“Hm,” murmured Loring, shaking out the embers from his pipe and gazing into the empty bowl. “With any one else I should say that meant a woman; but with you it could not be.”
“Why not with me as well as with any other man?”
“Because there is no woman alive who would be fool enough to refuse you.”
“Bless your heart, Stephen! It is only your blind loyalty that makes you think me irresistible.”
“Do you mean that there really is a woman so benighted? What is she thinking of?”