"If you would stop dancing about, and let your naturally sweet disposition have a chance, and would explain just why you are here and what you want to do, and would ask me nicely,—it might help you more than to get apoplexy over it."
The two women exclaimed under their breaths to each other and moved farther away, as if from an impending explosion. The assistant camera man gurgled and turned his back abruptly. Lee Milligan, wandering up from the stables, stopped and stared. No one, within the knowledge of those present, had ever spoken so to Robert Grant Burns; no one had ever dreamed of speaking thus to him. They had seen him when rage had mastered him and for slighter cause; it was not an experience that one would care to repeat.
Robert Grant Burns walked up to Jean as if he meant to lift her from the bench and hurl her by sheer brute force out of his way. He stopped so close to her that his shadow covered her.
"Are you going to get out of the way so we can go on?" he asked, in the tone of one who gives a last merciful chance of escape from impending doom.
"Are you going to explain why you're here, and apologize for your tone and manner, which are extremely rude?" Jean did not pay his rage the compliment of a glance at him. She was looking at the dainty beak of the little brown bird, and was telling herself that she could not be bullied into losing control of herself. These two women should not have the satisfaction of calling her a crude, ignorant, country girl; and Robert Grant Burns should not have the triumph of browbeating her into yielding one inch of ground. She forced herself to observe the wonderfully delicate feathers on the bird's head. It seemed more content now in the little nest her two palms had made for it. Its heart did not flutter so much, and she fancied that the tiny, bead-like eyes were softer in their bright regard of her.
Robert Grant Burns came to a pause. Jean sensed that he was waiting for some reply, and she looked up at him. His hand was just reaching out to her shoulder, but it dropped instead to his coat pocket and fumbled for his handkerchief. Her eyes strayed to Pete Lowry. He was looking upward with that measuring glance which belongs to his profession, estimating the length of time the light would be suitable for the scene he had focussed. She followed his glance to where the shadow of the kitchen had crept closer to the bench. Jean was not stupid, and she had passed through the various stages of the kodak fever; she guessed what was in the mind of the operator, and when she met his eyes full, she smiled at him sympathetically.
"I should dearly love to watch you work," she said to him frankly. "But you see how it is; Mr. Burns hasn't got hold of himself yet. If he comes to his senses before he has a stroke of apoplexy, will you show me how you run that thing?"
"You bet I will," the red-sweatered one promised her cheerfully.
"How much longer will it be before this bench is in the shade?" she asked him next.
"Half an hour,—maybe a little longer." Pete glanced again anxiously upward.