"You did, decidedly! You—" There he broke off, for he found himself speaking to her profile.
She had looked away in a sudden flight of abstraction, very far away, where the lowering sun was stretching the shadows of the foot-hills toward the white posts. Capes and pillars and promontories of shadow there in the distance! Swinging, furry finger-points of shadow from the tall hollyhocks in the garden swaying with the breeze! The dark shade of the house's mass over the yard!
It was time for him to be at his desk. But she seemed far from any suggestion of going. She seemed to expect him to wait; otherwise he might have concluded that she had forgotten his presence. Yet were he to rustle a paper he knew that she would hear it. Though she did not change her position in the chair, she appeared subtly active in every fibre.
He found waiting easy, free as he was to watch the beauty of her profile in the glory of the sunset. The superb thing about her was that she always called for study. Her lips moved in sensitive turns; her breast rose in soft billows with her breaths; the long, flickering eyelashes ran outward from black to bronze and to feather tips of gold. In time measured by the regular standard of clock ticks, which in the brain may either race madly or drag mercilessly, she was not long silent. When she spoke she' did not look entirely around at first; he had no glimpse into her eyes.
"It was another experience of war," she said moodily, returning to the subject of Hugo. "Yes, something like the final chapter of experience, the trial of this dreamer." Then a wave of restless impatience with her abstraction swept over her. Speaking of dreamers, she herself would stop dreaming. "For experience does make a great difference, doesn't it?" she exclaimed with a sad, knowing smile. After a perceptible pause her eyes suddenly glowed into his. All the commotion of her thought was galvanized into purpose in the look. "I have had a heart full and a mind full of experiences!" she said. "I have been close to war—closer than you! I have looked on while others fought!"
The thing was coming! He should hear the story of the change that war had wrought in her. She appeared to regard him as the one listener whom she had sought; as a confidant who alone could understand her. His gift for listening was in full play as he relaxed and settled back in his chair, shading his eyes with his hand lest he should seem to stare. For in his eagerness he would not miss any one of her varied signals of emotion.
She was as vivid as he knew that she would be, her narration flashes of impression in clear detail. Her being seemed transparent to its depths and her moods through the last week to run past him in review. He marvelled at times at her military knowledge; again at her impartiality. She was neither for the Browns nor the Grays; she was simply telling what she had seen. She passed by some horrors; on others she dwelt with fearless emphasis.
"Then the hand-grenades were thrown!" She put her hands over her eyes. "As they fell"—she put her hands over her ears—"oh, the groans!"
"It was the Browns who started it!" he interjected in defence. "I had hoped that we should escape that kind of warfare." He was too intent to recall what he had said to the premier about using every known method of destruction.
"And this is only the beginning, isn't it?" she asked piteously, exhausted with her story.