“I haven’t any story, except just the story of that look.  Though it holds the story of love and hate and a hundred other things you and I would disagree about.  And I don’t know that I can convey to you—­you of the sunny paths—­what the look conveyed to me.  But imagine a crowd, a crazed crowd, all pushing to the center, and then in the center a face thrown back so you can see it for just an instant before it sinks to suffocation.  If you can fancy that look—­the last gasp for breath of one caught—­squeezed—­just going down—­a hatred of the crowd that got her there, just to suffocate her—­and perhaps one last wild look at the hills out beyond the crowd.  If you can get that—­that fear, suffocation, terror—­and don’t forget the hate—­yet like the dog you’ve kicked that grieved—­’How could you—­when it was a pat I wanted!’—­”

“I know it in the dog language,” said Katie quiveringly.

“Then imagine the dog crazed with thirst tied just out of reach of a leaping, dancing brook—­”

“Oh—­please.  That’s too plain.”

“It hurts when applied to dogs, does it?” he asked roughly.

“But they’re so helpless—­and they love us so!”

“And they’re so helpless—­and they hate because they weren’t let love.”

“But surely there aren’t many—­such looks.  Not many who feel they’re—­going down.  Why such things couldn’t be—­in this beautiful world.”

“Such,” he said smilingly, “has ever been the philosophy of sunny paths.”

“You needn’t talk to me like that!” she retorted angrily.  “I guess I saw the look as well as you did—­and did a little more to banish it than you did, too.”

“True.  I was just coming to that thing of my not having done anything.  Perhaps it was a case of fools rushing in where angels feared to tread.  You mustn’t mind being called a fool in any sentence so preposterous as to call me an angel.  You see one who had never been in the crowd would say—­’Why don’t you get out?’ It would be droll, wouldn’t it, to have some one on a far hill call—­’But why don’t you come over here?’ Don’t you see how that must appeal to the sense of humor of the one about to go down?”

She made no reply.  The thing that hurt her was that he seemed to enjoy hurting her.

“You see I’ve been in the crowd,” he said more simply and less bitterly.  “I don’t suppose men who have been most burned to death ever say—­’The fire can’t hurt you.’”

“And do they never try to rescue others from fires?” asked Katie scornfully.  “Do they let them burn—­just because they know fire for a dangerous thing?”

“Rescue them for what?  More fires?  It’s a question whether it’s very sane, or so very humane, either, to rescue a man from one fire just to have him on hand for another.”

“I don’t think I ever in my life heard anything more farfetched,” pronounced Katie.  “How do you know there’ll be another?”