Silent, motionless, he gazed out upon the flat, sombre land.
It was the night wherein the master of Quien Sabe wrought out his salvation, struggling with Self from dusk to dawn.

At the moment when Vanamee came upon him, the turmoil within him had only begun.

The heart of the man had not yet wakened.

The night was young, the dawn far distant, and all around him the fields of upturned clods lay bare and brown, empty of all life, unbroken by a single green shoot.
For a moment, the life-circles of these two men, of so widely differing characters, touched each other, there in the silence of the night under the stars.

Then silently Vanamee withdrew, going on his way, wondering at the trouble that, like himself, drove this hardheaded man of affairs, untroubled by dreams, out into the night to brood over an empty land.
Then speedily he forgot all else.