"Not exactly what you'd call fresh, is it, Crowdy?" he said lightly. "But the spring's outside and I'm scared to go out in the dark."
Crowdy drank thirstily and lay back, his eyes closed again. Lee rearranged his bandage.
"Put out the light now?" he asked Judith.
"No," she answered. "What's the use, Bud? There are no holes in the walls they could stick a gun-barrel through, are there?"
No one knew better than he that there were not.
"You see," said Judith, with a half-smile, heroically assumed, "I'm a little afraid of the dark, too! Anyway, since we've got to spend the night with a man in Crowdy's shape, it will be more cosey, won't it, with the light on?"
She even put out her hand to one of the books on the shelves which she could reach from her bench.
"And now," she added, "I'm sure that our hermit won't mind if we peep into his library, will he?"
"No," answered Lee gravely. "Most likely he'll be proud."
Lee found time to muse that life is made of incongruities, woman of inconsistencies. Here with a badly hurt man lying ten feet from her, with every likelihood of the night stillness being ripped in two by a rifle-shot, Judith sat and turned the pages of a book. It was a volume on the breeding and care of pure-blooded horses. Odd sort of thing for her hermit to have brought here with him! Her hand took down another volume. Horses again; a treatise by an eminent authority upon a newly imported line from Arabia. A third book; this, a volume of Elizabethan lyrics. Bud Lee flushed as he watched her. She turned the pages slowly, came back to the fly-leaf page, read the name scrawled there and, turning swiftly to Lee, said accusingly: