CHAPTER IX
UNIVERSAL ATTRIBUTES
Afterward Thompson could never quite determine what prompted him to follow Sophie Carr when he saw her go down toward the creek bank. He was on his way to Carr's house, driven thither by pure pressure of loneliness, born of three days' solitary communion within the limits of his own shack. He wanted to hear a human voice again. And it was a vagrant, unaccountable impulse that sent him after Sophie instead of directing him straight to Carr's living room, where her father would probably be sitting, pipe in mouth, book in hand.
He hurried with long strides after Sophie. She dipped below the sloping bank before he came up, and when he came noiselessly down to the grassy bank she stood leaning against a tree, gazing at the sluggish flow of Lone Moose.
He had seen her in moods that varied from feminine pettishness to the teasingly mischievous. But he had never seen her in quite the same pitch of spirits that caught his attention as soon as he reached her side.
There was something bubbling within her, some repressed excitement that kindled a glow in her gray eyes, kept a curiously happy smile playing about her lips.
And that magnetic something that drew the heart out of Thompson, afflicting him with a maddening surge of impulses, had never functioned so strongly.
"What is it?" he asked abruptly. "You seem—you look—"