"It's getting to be a sort of a nightmare with you, isn't it, Rod?" she said wistfully. "The whole thing."
"Oh, well," he replied absently, "another year, maybe sooner, it'll be finished—win, lose, or draw."
He lit a cigarette, drew a whiff or two, sat with it forgotten in his fingers till the stub burned him.
The long quitting blast went echoing up and down the channel. Men came pouring off the hill. The supper gong clanged, a prolonged and resonant metallic vibration, like an anvil under quick strokes of a hammer. Rod and his wife and boy walked to the small dining room set apart for their use. And still Andy and Isabel remained somewhere beyond that mossy point jutting like a green tongue into the sea.
Not until Rod and his wife were back on the porch and the last logger long since smoking in the bunk house amid a drone of talk did the twain appear. Andy walked straight on to the camp. Isabel perched herself on the top step. She regarded them with a heightened color, an obvious repression, a look in her eyes as if she had beheld wonders.
Mary looked after Andy, back at Isabel.
"I'll go along to keep you company," she suggested.
"I'm not the least bit hungry."
"Are you ill?" Mary inquired teasingly.
Isabel shook her head until the bobbed yellow hair stood out like an aureole.