"It will take a few minutes to explain," he said. Then, as she waited, he suddenly formed his plan, and followed the good old Devon principle of going straight to the point.
"I live diagonally across the square," he said quietly, "and I can see into your window from one of mine. So it happened that just now I—I saw what you were going to do."
For an instant she stood very still, looking at him, as if not quite taking in the meaning of his words. In the next her face and even her neck crimsoned darkly as if under the rush of a wave of angry humiliation. When she spoke her voice shook.
"You forget," she said, "that you have no right either to look into my room or to interfere with what you see there."
"I know," he told her, humbly, "and I beg your pardon again. The looking in was an accident, the merest chance, which I will explain to you later. The interference—well, I won't apologize for that. Surely you realize that it's—friendly."
For the first time her eyes left his. She looked around the room as if uncertain what to do or say.
"Perhaps you mean it so," she muttered at last. "But I consider it—impertinent."
A change was taking place in her. The fire that had flamed up at his entrance was dying out, leaving her with the look of one who is cowed and almost beaten. Even her last words lacked assurance. Watching her in puzzled sympathy, Laurie for the first time wished himself older and wiser than he was. How could he handle a situation like this? Neither then nor later did he ask himself how he would have handled it on the stage.
For a moment the two young things gazed at each other, in helplessness and irresolution on his side, in resentful questioning on hers. Even in the high tension of the moment Laurie subconsciously took in the picture she made as she stood there, defying him, with her back to the wall of life.
She was very lovely, more lovely than in the mirror; for now he was getting the full effect of her splendid coloring, set off by the gown she wore, a thing of rich but somber shades, lit up by a semi-barbaric necklace of amber and gold, that hung almost to her knees.