"So they have been looking for me?" she observed, with but little interest.
"What did you expect?" he questioned in his turn.
"But I didn't want to be found—I would rather stay lost," she responded. Shrinking away from him she went to the window and stood there, pressed closely against the panes, as if in a blind impulse to put the space of the room between them. "I will not go back even now—I will not go back," she insisted.
As he entered he had closed the door behind him, and leaning against it now, he looked at her with a flicker of his quiet smile.
"I'm not talking about going back, am I?" he rejoined. "Heaven knows you may stay here if you like the place." He glanced quickly about the crudely furnished little room hung with cheap crayon portraits. "It's rather hard, though, to fit you into these surroundings," he remarked with a flash of humour.
She shook her head. "They suit me as well as any other."
"And the people who live here?—What of them?"
"I like them because they are so near to the ground," she answered, "they've no surface of culture, or personality, or convention to bother one—they've no surface, indeed, of any kind."
"Well, it's all very interesting," he remarked, smiling, "but, in common decency, don't you think you might have sent me word?"
"I never thought of you an instant," she replied.