“I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the open hand and heart,” he said, on the night he donned my good black suit.

And I confess I was startled when I glanced over the top of my paper and saw a lofty-browed and eminently respectable-looking gentleman, boldly and carelessly at ease.  The Sunflower was right.  He must have known better days for the black suit and white shirt to have effected such a transformation.  Involuntarily I rose to my feet, prompted to meet him on equal ground.  And then it was that the Clay-Randolph glamour descended upon me.  He slept at Idlewild that night, and the next night, and for many nights.  And he was a man to love.  The Son of Anak, otherwise Rufus the Blue-Eyed, and also plebeianly known as Tots, rioted with him from brier-rose path to farthest orchard, scalped him in the haymow with barbaric yells, and once, with pharisaic zeal, was near to crucifying him under the attic roof beams.  The Sunflower would have loved him for the Son of Anak’s sake, had she not loved him for his own.  As for myself, let the Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone, of how often I wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the Lovable.  Yet he was a man of whom we knew nothing.  Beyond the fact that he was Kentucky-born, his past was a blank.  He never spoke of it.  And he was a man who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from emotion.  To him the world spelled itself out in problems.  I charged him once with being guilty of emotion when roaring round the den with the Son of Anak pickaback.  Not so, he held.  Could he not cuddle a sense-delight for the problem’s sake?

He was elusive.  A man who intermingled nameless argot with polysyllabic and technical terms, he would seem sometimes the veriest criminal, in speech, face, expression, everything; at other times the cultured and polished gentleman, and again, the philosopher and scientist.  But there was something glimmering; there which I never caught—­flashes of sincerity, of real feeling, I imagined, which were sped ere I could grasp; echoes of the man he once was, possibly, or hints of the man behind the mask.  But the mask he never lifted, and the real man we never knew.

“But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?” I asked.  “Never mind Loria.  Tell me.”

“Well, if I must.”  He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.

“In a town that shall be nameless,” he began, “in fact, a city of fifty thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave for dollars and women for dress, an idea came to me.  My front was prepossessing, as fronts go, and my pockets empty.  I had in recollection a thought I once entertained of writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer.  Not that they are reconcilable, of course, but the room offered for scientific satire—­”

I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.