The incident had begun by Bernald’s running across Doctor Robert Wade one hot summer night at the University Club, and by Wade’s saying, in the tone of unprofessional laxity which the shadowy stillness of the place invited: “I got hold of a queer fish at St. Martin’s the other day—case of heat-prostration picked up in Central Park. When we’d patched him up I found he had nowhere to go, and not a dollar in his pocket, and I sent him down to our place at Portchester to re-build.”

The opening roused his hearer’s attention. Bob Wade had an odd unformulated sense of values that Bernald had learned to trust.

“What sort of chap? Young or old?”

“Oh, every age—full of years, and yet with a lot left. He called himself sixty on the books.”

“Sixty’s a good age for some kinds of living. And age is of course purely subjective. How has he used his sixty years?”

“Well—part of them in educating himself, apparently. He’s a scholar—humanities, languages, and so forth.”

“Oh—decayed gentleman,” Bernald murmured, disappointed.

“Decayed? Not much!” cried the doctor with his accustomed literalness. “I only mentioned that side of Winterman—his name’s Winterman—because it was the side my mother noticed first. I suppose women generally do. But it’s only a part—a small part. The man’s the big thing.”

“Really big?”

“Well—there again. ... When I took him down to the country, looking rather like a tramp from a ‘Shelter,’ with an untrimmed beard, and a suit of reach-me-downs he’d slept round the Park in for a week, I felt sure my mother’d carry the silver up to her room, and send for the gardener’s dog to sleep in the hall the first night. But she didn’t.”

“I see. ‘Women and children love him.’ Oh, Wade!” Bernald groaned.

“Not a bit of it! You’re out again. We don’t love him, either of us. But we feel him—the air’s charged with him. You’ll see.”