"Les,—it's velee hot."
Something in his tone caused her to start; caused her to look around her as though she were afraid.
"I wouldn't have spoke," she stammered. "I wouldn't have spoke only it's such a fierce night." Then as he did not answer her immediately, her voice rose querulously. "It's a fierce night; ain't it, now?"
That was the word for which he had so vainly searched throughout the vocabulary of his carefully acquired English. The word the woman had given him, that expressed the sullen menace of the night about him.
"It is—fie—" He made an effort to accomplish the refractory "r." "It is fierce."
The hand she had withdrawn from his arm was reached out again. He could feel her fingers scrape like the talons of a frightened bird around his wrist.
"You get it too, mister?"
"Get what?"
"The kind of feeling that makes you think something is going to happen?" She drew the back of her free hand across her mouth. "Ain't it making you afraid?"
Somehow the woman's words aroused within him a dread that was a prophecy. He made one attempt at holding to his acquired Americanism. The Americanism which was slowly receding before the stifled waves of Oriental foreboding, like a weak, protesting thing that fears a hidden strength. For he knew the foreboding was fate; and he knew too that when fulfilled, it would be met with all the stoicism of a Chinaman.