Stealthily he stole down the littered passage—stealthily put foot in the dusk room where the museum was. He might pad it like an Ojibbeway, but she heard him. She heard him and turned, her eyes opening chatoyant.
She was standing near the loaded shelves, fingering something—a round yellow flint-stone, by the look of it—that she had lifted from its place amongst the collection.
“What have you there?” said he, curious and masterful at once.
She did not answer. But she snatched the object to her bosom and glinted at him with adumbrated pupils.
“Let me see it,” he said, advancing a step.
At that she gave out a thin little tale of screams, like the cry of a shot rat, and, retreating into a black corner, hugged her treasure with a frantic closeness.
“It’s not for you!” she cried. “It’s his—Dennis’s. It was thrown through the window to him that night you went a-wooing to ‘Chatters.’”
“Thrown! by whom, you jade?”
“How should I know? The shadows were thick about the house. They cried to get back to their dark hole under the floor against daylight. But he wouldn’t let them, and they stormed and wept. I would have opened the door and given them passage; but he is wise, my wise brother, and he forbade me. ‘They must bid higher first,’ said he.”
It was as if a dark veil fell over the listener’s face.