"That's better," he said, with a great evidence of content, as she sank back upon it before solicitous pressure. "The cushions are hard, but the passengers are earnestly requested to place their feet upon them." He drew in the table again, so that she might have its rest for her arm or her elbow, and deferring the moment for their eyes to make their first official meeting, bustled off to the sideboard. "Please excuse the grim formality of everything you find here," he continued, in light-hearted purpose, and commingling his words with an urgent jingling of glass, "but I 'm a musical sort of man, and like the rest of them, a lover of law and order. A time and place for everything, that 's our motto, and everything in its place. It 's a little weakness of ours.... Therefore"—his voice suddenly went cavernous in the recesses of the big cupboard—"... where on earth 's the brandy? Ah!" he emerged again on the interjection smiling, as on a triumphal car. "Here it is. Now I 'm going to give you a little of this ... it 's better than any amount of bad drinking water, and does n't taste half so nasty. Oh, no, no, no"—in answer to the intuition of a quick protesting turn of head from the sofa—"... not much. I won't let you have much, so it 's no use asking. Only as much as is good for you. Just a lit—tle drop and no more." He measured out the drop to the exact length of the accented syllable, and the stopper clinked home under a soft, satisfied "So-o-o!" The syphon took up the word, seething it vigorously into the glass, and next moment his arm had spanned the table to an encouraging: "Here we are! Take a good pull of this while it fizzes."
A soft, tremulous hand, nut-brown to the wrist, stole out in timid obedience over the table, and the Spawer perceived his visitor for the first time.
If the mere sound of her voice had aroused his wonder, the sight of the girl's face added doubly to his surprise. A face as little to be looked for in this place and at this time, and under these conditions, as to make quest for orchids down some pitmouth with pick and Davy lamp. He could not maintain the look long, for before satisfying his own inquiry he sought to establish the girl's confidence, but he noted the wide generous forehead, the big consuming eyes, burning deep in sorrowing self-reproach and giving him a moment's gaze over the uplifted tumbler; the dispassionate narrow nose, sprinkled about its bridge and between the brows with a pepper-castor helping of freckled candor; the small lips, parted submissively to the glass rim over two slips of milky teeth; the long, sleek cheeks; the slender, pear-shaped chin; the soft, supple neck of russet tan, spliced on to a gleaming shaft of ivory, where it dipped through her dress-collar to her bosom; the quick throbbing throat, and the burning lobes of red, like live cinders, in her hair.
As to the girl herself, her whence and where and whither, the Spawer could make no guess. She wore a shabby pale blue Tam-o'-Shanter, faded under innumerable suns, and washed out to many a shower, but on her head it appeared perfectly reputable and self-supporting, and identified itself with the girl's face so instantly and so completely that its weather-stain counted for preciousness, like the oaten tint of her skin. A storm-tried mackintosh-cape, looped over her arms and falling loosely down her back from the shoulders, and the print blouse, evidenced by her bust above the table and her sleeves, and the serviceable skirt of blue serge that the Spawer had caught sight of in the cleft between the table and sofa, completed the girl as revealed through her dress. Everything about her was for hard wear and tear, and had stood to the task. There was not a single button's worth of pretension in the whole of her attire; not a brooch at her throat, nor a bangle on either of her wrists to plead for her station. She had dipped her nose meekly into the tumbler and was letting the sparkles play about her lips momentarily, with dropped eyelids; then the glass went down to the table, and her eyes opened wide upon the Spawer as though casting up the full column of her liabilities, resolved to shirk nothing.
"You don't drink," he said, with a voice of solicitude. "I have n't made it too weak for you? ... Surely! I took great care—I might have been making it for myself. Or is there anything else you 'd rather have?"
He found her soft voice entangled in his inquiry, and stopped.
"... Ever so much," he drew up in time to hear. "But it 's not that..." The frank lips were wrestling to pronounce sentence upon her crime, but they broke down in the task and transferred their self-imposed judgment to him. "I don't know what you must think of me..." she said.
The Spawer laughed light-hearted indulgence upon the admission.
"To tell the truth," he said, "I hardly know what to think myself, so it 's no use saying I do. I thought perhaps ... poultry, first of all; but your voice does n't sound a bit like poultry, and I 'm sure you don't look it. And I don't think it was apples either, though you 'd got the right gate for those. Besides, apples don't count ... that way. I 've gathered them myself at this time of night before now, and been hauled back over the wall by a leg. We don't think anything of that."
"It was the piano," she explained unsteadily, and for a moment the steadfast flames in her eyes flickered under irresolute lids.