She went on with her work steadily for some minutes, without so much as a look behind. Yet Max felt that she was aware of his presence, and he knew also, without being sure how the knowledge came to him, that the girl's feeling toward himself had changed now that she was no longer alone in the house with him. The constraint which might have been expected toward a person of the opposite sex in the strange circumstances, which had been so entirely absent from her manner on their first meeting, had now stolen into her attitude toward him.
Yet, although the former absence of this constraint had been a most effective part of her attraction for him, Max began to think that the new and slight self-consciousness which caused her to affect to ignore him was a fresh charm. Before, while she implored him to come into the house with her, it was to a fellow-creature only that the frightened girl had made her appeal. Now that her grandmother had returned, and she was lonely and unprotected no longer, she remembered that he was a man.
This change in her attitude toward him was strikingly exemplified when, having lit the fire, she rose from her knees, and taking a kettle from the hob, turned toward the door.
"You haven't gone then?" said she.
"No!"
She came forward, taking the lid off the kettle as she walked.
"You won't be advised?"
She was passing him swiftly, with the manner of a busy housewife, when Max, encouraged by her new reserve, and a demure side-look, which was not without coquetry, seized the hand which held the kettle, and asked her if he was to get no thanks for coming to her assistance as he had done.
"I did thank you," said she, not attempting to withdrew her hand, but standing, grave and with downcast eyes, between him and the door.
"Well, in a way, you did. But you didn't thank me enough. You yourself admit it was a bold thing for a stranger to do!"