Evidently the lack of head covering had troubled her,
for she was elated at her find. She left me,
scrawling a note of thanks and pinning it with a bill
to the table-cloth, and ran up-stairs to the mirror
and the promised soap and water.
I did not see her when she came down. I had
discovered a bench with a tin basin outside the kitchen
door, and was washing, in a helpless, one-sided way.
I felt rather than saw that she was standing in the
door-way, and I made a final plunge into the basin.
“How is it possible for a man with only a right
hand to wash his left ear?” I asked from the
roller towel. I was distinctly uncomfortable:
men are more rigidly creatures of convention than
women, whether they admit it or not. “There
is so much soap on me still that if I laugh I will
blow bubbles. Washing with rain-water and home-made
soap is like motoring on a slippery road. I only
struck the high places.”
Then, having achieved a brilliant polish with the
towel, I looked at the girl.
She was leaning against the frame of the door, her
face perfectly colorless, her breath coming in slow,
difficult respirations. The erratic hat was
pinned to place, but it had slid rakishly to one side.
When I realized that she was staring, not at me, but
past me to the road along which we had come, I turned
and followed her gaze. There was no one in sight:
the lane stretched dust white in the sun,—no
moving figure on it, no sign of life.
MISS WEST’S REQUEST
The surprising change in her held me speechless.
All the animation of the breakfast table was gone:
there was no hint of the response with which, before,
she had met my nonsensical sallies. She stood
there, white-lipped, unsmiling, staring down the dusty
road. One hand was clenched tight over some
small object. Her eyes dropped to it from the
distant road, and then closed, with a quick, indrawn
breath. Her color came back slowly. Whatever
had caused the change, she said nothing. She
was anxious to leave at once, almost impatient over
my deliberate masculine way of getting my things together.
Afterward I recalled that I had wanted to explore
the barn for a horse and some sort of a vehicle to
take us to the trolley, and that she had refused to
allow me to look. I remembered many things later
that might have helped me, and did not. At the
time, I was only completely bewildered. Save
the wreck, the responsibility for which lay between
Providence and the engineer of the second section,
all the events of that strange morning were logically
connected; they came from one cause, and tended unerringly
to one end. But the cause was buried, the end
not yet in view.
Not until we had left the house well behind did the
girl’s face relax its tense lines. I was
watching her more closely than I had realized, for
when we had gone a little way along the road she turned
to me almost petulantly. “Please don’t
stare so at me,” she said, to my sudden confusion.
“I know the hat is dreadful. Green always
makes me look ghastly.”
