“I can cook,” she assured him. “What are we going to have for supper?” She was beginning to see some humor in the situation.
“Why I just figured to scramble some eggs, and make coffee,” Jeff confessed. “The things are in the pantry, in through the dining room,” he added.
“I’ll have supper all ready when you come back,” she promised.
He said reluctantly, “Well, all right,” and left her there.
When he returned, half an hour later, he found her, her hair in a loose braid, wearing one of his wife’s aprons, busy about the kitchen table. “I’ve everything ready,” she told him, “but I waited, so that things would be nice and hot.”
“I got to separate the milk first,” he explained.
She nodded and, while he performed that operation, busied herself with egg beater and mixing bowl. He took the cream down cellar, set the skim milk in the shed for his hogs. When he had washed his hands and face she summoned him to supper in the dining room. She had made an omelet and toast, and her coffee was better than his. He ate with the silent intentness of a hungry man. Afterward she insisted on washing the dishes, while he read, fitfully enough, yet with an appearance of absorption, the paper that had been left that afternoon in the mail box before the door. There was something grotesquely domestic in the situation, and Jeff’s pulses were pounding with wonder at it all.
He had asked the woman no single question. There were a thousand questions he desired to ask, but an innate delicacy restrained him. The glamour of the hour had dazed this man; his senses were confused. There was an unreality about the whole experience. The dishes, rattling in the sink, sounded no differently than when his wife washed them. The illusion that it was his wife who had come home in this guise had for a moment dominion over him. The lines of newsprint staggered and swam before his inattentive eyes. He wondered, wondered, wondered. But he asked no question of his guest.
When she had finished her self-appointed task and come into the dining room where he was sitting she seemed to expect a catechism; but Jeff kept his eyes upon his paper, as a man clings to a safe anchorage, till at last she was forced to speak.
“I’ve been expecting you to question me,” she said uncertainly.