"She sounded very frightened."
"Good!" He smacked his fist against his palm. "Magic works," he said grimly. "We'll make it work better. She'll be more frightened after we begin."
"Perhaps you have already begun."
He did not understand at the time the significance of that toneless reply.
XII.
The rhythmic rattle and surge of the train had a soothing monotony. You could hear the engine puffing lustily. The wide, heat-baked, green fields swinging past the window of the compartment, drowsed in the noonday sun. The farms and cattle and horses dotting them here and there, looked equally somnolent. He would have liked to sleep, but he knew he would not be able to. And as for—She apparently never slept.
"I want to run over some things," he said. "Interrupt me if you hear anything that sounds wrong or you don't understand."
From the corner of his eye he noted the figure sitting between him and the window nod once.
It occurred to him that there was something terrible about an adaptability that could familiarize him even to—her, so that now after only a day and a half he was using her as a kind of thinking machine, asking for her memories and reactions in the same way that a man might direct a servant to put a certain record on the phonograph.