She looked at him. There were strange things in the look, things that thrilled him, and other things he subconsciously resented, without understanding why. When she spoke there was a more personal note in her voice than it had yet held.
"You?" she asked; and she added almost lightly, "That seems absurd."
"I know."
Laurie spoke with the new humility he had found only to-day.
"You think that because I'm so young I couldn't have been desperate enough for that. But—you're young, too."
He was looking straight at her as he spoke. Her eyes, a little hard and challenging, softened, then dropped.
"That's different," she muttered.
He nodded.
"I know the causes were different enough," he agreed. "But the feeling back of them, that pushes one up against such a proposition, must be pretty much the same sort of thing. Anyway, it makes me understand; and I consider that it gives me a claim on you, and the privilege of trying to help you."
Her eyes were still cast down, and suddenly she flushed, a strange, dark flush that looked out of place on the pure whiteness of her skin. She had the exaggerated but wholesome pallor of skin that often goes with reddish hair and red-brown eyes. It does not lend itself becomingly to flushes, and this deep flush lingered, an unwelcome visitor, throughout her muttered, almost ungracious words.