Her simplicity, and again the clear, shining eyes with their direct and smiling glance astounded him.
"You'd best give this to your friend, yourself," she went on, putting the bowl on the table. "It seems to trouble him to see a strange face."
She lifted Davey from the stranger's arms and he took the bowl of gruel to the other man.
"Be gentle with him and humour him," she warned, "but make him eat all of it. I'll put a blanket here on the hearth for you, and Davey and I will sleep at the other end of the room."
When she had thrown all the spare clothing in the hut on the floor before the fire and had spread a patchwork quilt and the rug of 'possum skins at the far end of the room for herself, she sat down on a low stool near the door and lifted Davey's lips to her breast. She sang a half-whispering lullaby, rocking him in her arms. His cries ceased; her thoughts went off into a dreamy psalm of thanksgiving as his soft mouth pulled at her breast.
She looked up to find the eyes of the tall stranger on her.
A gaunt, long-limbed man, his clothes hung on his arms and legs as if they were the wooden limbs of a scarecrow. The shreds were knotted and tied together, and showed bare, shrunken shanks and shins, burnt and cut about, the dark hair of virility thick on them. His face, lean and leathern, had a curious expression of hunger. The eyes in it held dark memories, yet a glitter of the sun.
Mary Cameron vaguely realised that she had known what manner of man this was the moment she looked into his eyes. That was why she had not been afraid when he confronted her on the doorstep; why, too, she had been able to ask him into her house and treat him as an unexpected, but not unwelcome guest.
The man on the bed moaned. Suddenly he started up with a shrill scream.
"A wave! A wave! We'll be swamped."