“Yes, it is quite out; but Mr. Smith and Mr. Humphries are both there, and one of them will stay until there is no more fear of it lighting up again, though it looks as if it might rain, in which case there will not be any danger at all,” said Bertha. And then she refused to talk, or to let Grace talk, finally succeeding in getting the invalid off to sleep for a short time. Not a word had Grace said of any person having been at the house, and Bertha might have been inclined to think that Dicky had dreamed it but for those two half-dollars, which he and Molly displayed so proudly when she went out to them in the paddock after their mother had dropped into a doze.
Having unhitched Pucker and turned the old animal loose to feed, she went indoors to change her singed and dirty garments, and incidentally to wash her face.
“Oh! oh! what an unutterable fright I look!” she gasped, staring at herself in the glass, and reflecting ruefully that Mrs. Smith had not looked bad at all; there had not been the shadow of a smudge across her face, and her hair, although a little loosened by the wind and the hard work, had been quite passably tidy.
But Bertha’s heavy masses of hair were hanging down her back, her face was streaked and smudged with dust and blacks, her blouse was torn open at the neck and slit up the arm where it had taken fire, and her skirt was a ruin.
“It is my fate to look a most awful guy when I am forced to do anything out of the common,” she muttered to herself, as she washed her face with tremendous zeal and energy, and then, as she did her hair, she recalled that time when she had been forced to swim out to the Shark’s Teeth at Mestlebury in that dreadful garment with the patches of vivid green.
Suddenly she dropped her comb with a clatter, and stood before the glass with her hands tightly clasped. She was recalling the face of the man whose life she had saved. He reminded her of—of—of whom?
“Why, why, I do believe that the man with the Smiths to-day was the very same individual!” she gasped. “But surely, surely the coincidence is too ridiculous!” and she laughed nervously as she stooped to pick up the comb; then she twisted up her hair in a great hurry, clothed herself in tidy garments, and went out to get supper.
There was little room in her busy days for dreaming now, and to-night she seemed more driven than ever. Grace was decidedly unwell from the strain and excitement of the afternoon, while the children were tired, hungry, and, truth to tell, rather cross; for the day had been fiercely hot, and they had been running about since early morning.
For a time her one pair of hands were more than full, but when the little ones had been fed, washed, and put to bed, there was a brief half-hour of respite in which she could sit still and think. And the more she thought the more sure she was that the man with the Smiths to-day and the individual whom she had saved from the Shark’s Teeth rocks were one and the same person. To-morrow she would go over to Mrs. Smith and ask for the name of the unknown. Then she would write to him and tell him that she was the girl who had saved him, and she would remind him that she had his coat still, if he wished to claim it again.
Would she write to him?