His gaze came to an inquiring rest on Hollister.

“What’s up, old thing?” he asked lightly.  “Why so mum?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Hollister answered.

“Bad thing to get in the dumps,” Rutherford observed sagely.  “You ought to keep a bottle of Scotch handy for that.”

“Drink myself into a state of mind where the world glitters and becomes joyful, eh?  No, I don’t fancy your prescription.  I’d be more apt to run amuck.”

“Oh, come now,” Rutherford remonstrated.  “It isn’t so bad as that.  Cheer up, old man.  Things might be worse, you know.

“Oh, hell!” Hollister exploded.

After which he relapsed into sullen silence, to which Rutherford, frankly mystified and somewhat inclined to resent this self-contained mood, presently left him.

Hollister was glad when the man went away.  He had a feeling of relief when the door closed and retreating footsteps echoed down the hall.  He had grasped at a renewal of Rutherford’s acquaintance as a man drowning in a sea of loneliness would grasp at any friendly straw.  And Rutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort of straw.  The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish.  He could tolerate Hollister’s mutilated countenance because he had grown accustomed to horrible sights,—­not because he had any particular sympathy for a crippled, mutilated man’s misfortune, or any understanding of such a man’s state of feeling.  To Rutherford that was the fortune of war.  So many were killed.  So many crippled.  So many disfigured.  It was luck.  He believed in his own luck.  The evil that befell other men left him rather indifferent.  That was all.  When Hollister once grasped Rutherford’s attitude, he almost hated the man.

He sat now staring out the window.  A storm had broken over Vancouver that day.  To-night it was still gathering force.  The sky was a lowering, slate-colored mass of clouds, spitting squally bursts of rain that drove in wet lines against his window and made the street below a glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles that were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels.  The wind droned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook with its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way, rattled the windows in their frames.  Now and then, in a momentary lull of the wind, a brief cessation of the city noises, Hollister could hear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at English Bay, snoring in the mouth of False Creek.  A dreary, threatening night that fitted his mood.