And still Sophie Carr did not speak.  She leaned against the car body.  He felt her eyes upon him, questioning, appraising, critical, while he released the jack, gathered up the tools, and tied them up in the roll on the running board.

“There you are,” he found himself facing her, his tongue giving off commonplace statements, while his heart thumped heavily in his breast.  “Ready for the road again.”

“Do you remember what Donald Lachlan used to say?” Sophie answered irrelevantly.  “Long time I see you no.  Eh, Mr. Thompson?”

She held out one gloved hand with just the faintest suggestion of a smile hovering about her mouth.  Thompson’s work-roughened fingers closed over her small soft hand.  He towered over her, looking down wistfully.

“I didn’t think you knew me,” he muttered.

Sophie laughed.  The smile expanded roguishly.  The old, quizzical twinkle flickered in her eyes.

“You must think my memory poor,” she replied.  “You’re not one of the peas in a pod, you know.  I knew you, and still I wasn’t sure.  It seemed scarcely possible.  It’s a long, long way from the Santa Clara Valley to Lone Moose.”

“Yes,” he answered calmly.  “A long way—­the way I came.”

“In a purely geographical sense?”

Her voice was tinged with gentle raillery.

“Perhaps,” he answered noncommittally.

It dawned upon him that for all his gladness to see her—­and he was glad—­he nursed a tiny flame of resentment.  He had come a long way measured on the map, and a far greater distance measured in human experience, in spiritual reckoning.  If the old narrow faith had failed him he felt that slowly and surely he was acquiring a faith that would not fail him, because it was based on a common need of mankind.  But he was still sure there must be a wide divergence in their outlook.  He was getting his worldly experience, his knowledge of material factors, of men’s souls and faiths and follies and ideals and weaknesses in a rude school at first hand—­and Sophie had got hers out of books and logical deductions from critically assembled fact.  There was a difference in the two processes.  He knew, because he had tried both.  And where the world at large faced him, and must continue to face him, like an enemy position, something to be stormed, very likely with fierce fighting, for Sophie Carr it had all been made easy.

So he did not follow up that conversational lead.  He was not going to bare his soul offhand to gratify any woman’s curiosity.  It would be very easy to make a blithering ass of himself again—­with her—­because of her.  Already he was on his guard against that.  His pride was alert.

Sophie stowed the canvas tool roll under the seat cushion.  She climbed to her seat behind the steering column and turned to Thompson.

“Which way are you bound?” she asked.  “I’ll give you a lift, and we can talk.”

“I’m on my way to San Francisco,” he said.  “But time is no object in my young life right now, or I’d take the Interurban instead of walking.  It would be demoralizing to me, I’m afraid, to whiz down these roads in a machine like this.”