Thus casually dismissed, Io murmured a “Thank you” which was not as meek as it sounded, and withdrew to rummage among the canned edibles drawn from the inexhaustible stock of Sears-Roebuck.  Having laid out a selection, housewifely, and looked to the oil stove derived from the same source, she turned with some curiosity to the mental pabulum with which this strange young hermit had provided himself.  Would this, too, bear the mail-order imprint and testify to mail-order standards?  At first glance the answer appeared to be affirmative.  The top shelf of the home-made case sagged with the ineffable slusheries of that most popular and pious of novelists, Harvey Wheelwright.  Near by, “How to Behave on All Occasions” held forth its unimpeachable precepts, while a little beyond, “Botany Made Easy” and “The Perfect Letter Writer” proffered further aid to the aspiring mind.  Improvement, stark, blatant Improvement, advertised itself from that culturous and reeking compartment.  But just below—­Io was tempted to rub her eyes—­stood Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy”; a Browning, complete; that inimitably jocund fictional prank, Frederic’s “March Hares,” together with the same author’s fine and profoundly just “Damnation of Theron Ware”; Taylor’s translation of Faust; “The [broken-backed] Egoist”; “Lavengro” (Io touched its magic pages with tender fingers), and a fat, faded, reddish volume so worn and obscured that she at once took it down and made explorative entry.  She was still deep in it when the owner arrived.

“Have you found enough to keep you amused?”

She looked up from the pages and seemed to take him all in anew before answering.  “Hardly the word.  Bewildered would be nearer the feeling.”

“It’s a queerish library, I suppose,” he said apologetically.

“If I believed in dual personality—­” she began; but broke off to hold up the bulky veteran.  “Where did you get ’The Undying Voices’?”

“Oh, that’s a windfall.  What a bully title for a collection of the great poetries, isn’t it!”

She nodded, one caressing hand on the open book, the other propping her chin as she kept the clear wonder of her eyes upon him.

“It makes you think of singers making harmony together in a great open space.  I’d like to know the man who made the selections,” he concluded.

“What kind of a windfall?” she asked.

“A real one.  Pullman travelers sometimes prop their windows open with books.  You can see the window-mark on the cover of this one.  I found it two miles out, beside the right-of-way.  There was no name in it, so I kept it.  It’s the book I read most except one.”

“What’s the one?”

He laughed, holding up the still more corpulent Sears-Roebuck catalogue.

“Ah,” said she gravely.  “That accounts, I suppose, for the top shelf.”

“Yes, mostly.”

“Do you like them?  The Conscientious Improvers, I mean?”