They sat around the fire the cool fall evenings required, and talked in low tones. Once in a while one or another of the boys would step into the little room off, a minute, then come quietly back to the group. Bill Hapgood had good care that night. But after a time the little group seemed to disintegrate into pairs. Gus and Babette, sitting side by side on the old lounge, dropped their voices to whispers, while Dan and Rachel, somewhat withdrawn from each other, slowly rocked in two old cane chairs. As Dan returned to his seat after one of his short absences with the dead, he flung a glance toward the other couple and remarked, sotto voce.
"Gus is getting lots of cheek since he come to be an architect. There was a time he darsn't look at Bab."
"He always liked her, though."
"Oh, of course. Who don't? She's pretty and good and gay. But she felt above Gus, once."
"Did she? I never thought so."
"He thought so. She would hardly notice him."
"Sometimes," said Rachel slowly, "folks feel offish themselves, and imagine everybody else does. I've heard Freda Wilkes talk about folks slighting her, when she'd go along the street with her head so high they couldn't anybody reach up to her. I'm some that way myself, mother says. But I don't know it till it's over. I get to thinking, and forget what's around me. It seems to me, often, as if there was a lot more things in this world—yes, and people too—than we can see around us. I don't believe in ghosts, either, at least not the scarey kind, but sometimes I seem to get off this earth into something higher and better. It's then I forget folks. But it isn't pride. I never feel how little and ignorant I am as at those times."
Dan rocked on silently and looked at the fire.
He loved to hear Rachel talk. There was a peculiar cadence in her voice, a rich depth, unusual in young women. There was not a shrill nor common strain in it. That "high" look Joyce had noted went with high thoughts, and a voice undertoned by a beautiful soul. Dan felt this without thinking it out in so many words. Another idea began to force its way into his moody brain. Just because Rachel had this unusual quality, this power of looking inward, might she not understand the complexities of his life better than others? He wondered in his tense silence, but did not raise his eyes to see.
His silence finally chilled Rachel, and she, too, began to stare at the fire. The low talk of the other couple ceased and Gus said, explanatorily,