Her perseverance began, in spite of him, to puzzle him. What in all the world of worlds did she want of him? Also, and again in spite of him, he began to wonder what sort of female being this was.
"And so my name is really the only thing commendable about me?" she went on. "My nose isn't really pug, Mr. Drennen."
She crinkled it up for his inspection, turning sideways so that he might study her profile, then challenging his eyes gaily with her own.
"It is said to be my worst feature," she continued gravely. "And after all, don't you think one's nose is like one's gown in that it's true effect lies in the way one wears it?"
"How old are you?" he said curiously, the ice of him giving the first evidence of thaw.
"Less than three score and ten in actual years," she told him. "Vastly more than that in wisdom. Who's getting impertinent now?"
He hadn't said half a dozen sentences to a woman in half a dozen years. But then he hadn't seen a woman of her class and type in nearly twice that length of time. Besides, a week of enforced idleness in his dugout, of blank inactivity, had brought a new sort of loneliness. A bit surprised at what he was doing, a bit amused, not without a feeling of contempt for himself, he let the bars down. He leaned back a little upon his rock, caught up a knee in his clasped hands, thus easing the ache in his side, and set his eyes to meet hers searchingly.
"This is an odd place for a girl like you, Ygerne," he said meditatively.
"Is it? And why?"
"Because," he answered slowly, "so far as I know, only two kinds of people ever come this way. Some are human hogs come to get their feet into a trough of gold; some are here because there is such a thing as the law outside and it has driven them here."