“Men are not bad out there,” he assured her. “Some are, of course; but most of them are not. They help one another often enough; they are friends and pardners, and a pretty good sort.”
He talked with her thusly for an hour. Through it she sat very still, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up between her clasped hands, her eyes steady upon his. What emotions, if any, he stirred in her breast, he could not guess. Her expression altered very little—never to show what she thought of him.
He felt rather hopeless, ready to give over in despair, when out of her calm and apparently unconcerned, uninterested quiet came the first swift, unexpected question. He was speaking carelessly of some friends in Vancouver with whom he had visited—the Grahams, who had the bulliest little team of twins you ever saw—”
“Tell me about them!” she interrupted eagerly.
Sheldon, in his surprise at hearing her speak at all, lost the thread of his story.
“The Grahams?” he asked. “Why, they—”
“No, the babies,” she said. “I have never seen a baby. Just little baby bears and squirrels.”
She stopped as abruptly as she had begun, her lips tight shut. But Sheldon had gropingly understood a wee bit of what lay in the girl’s heart, and hurried to answer, pretending not to see her return to her stubborn taciturnity.
“Well,” he told her, pleased so that his good-humored smile came back into his eyes, “they’re just the cutest little pair of rascals you ever saw. Bill and Bet, they call ’em. Just two years when I saw them last; walking around, you know, and looking on at life as though they knew all about it. And up to ’most anything. They are something like young bears, come to think about it! Just about as awkward, falling over everything. And roly-poly, fat as butterballs. Why, would you believe it—”
And so forth. Before he got through he made a fairly creditable story of it, combining in the Graham twins all the baby tricks he had ever seen, heard, or read of. He affected not to be watching her all the time, but none the less saw that there was at last a little sparkle of interest in her eyes.