Her own voice seemed to drop into an extra quietness that made it remote. She looked down at her hands on her lap.
“Yes, I have liked you. I have told Father I liked you,” she answered.
He got up, and made an impetuous rush at his goal.
“Then—say, I'm going in there to wake up Mr. Hutchinson and ask him not to sail to-morrow morning.”
“You'd better not wake him up,” she answered, smiling; but he saw that her face changed and flushed. “It's not a good time to ask Father anything when he's just been waked up. And we HAVE to go. The express is coming at eight.”
“Send it away again; tell 'em you're not going. Tell 'em any old thing. Little Ann, what's the matter with you? Something's the matter. Have I made a break?”
He had felt the remoteness in her even before he had heard it in her dropped voice. It had been vaguely there even when he sat down on the trunk. Actually there was a touch of reserve about her, as though she was keeping her little place with the self-respecting propriety of a girl speaking to a man not of her own world.
“I dare say I've done some fool thing without knowing it. I don't know where I'm at, anyhow,” he said woefully.
“Don't look at me like that, Mr. Temple Barholm,” she said—“as if I was unkind. I—I'm NOT.”
“But you're different,” he implored. “I saw it the minute I came up. I ran up-stairs just crazy to talk to you,—yes, crazy to talk to you—and you—well, you were different. Why are you, if you're not mad?”