"I can't understand why you should be as you are," he said at length, his voice breaking.
"Ah, there's reason enough," she sighed, and turned away from him.
He threw himself down before the fire. But Mary did not sleep when she lay on the floor at the other end of the room, although the regular breathing of her guest told her when he slept. Once she sat up and looked at him where he lay stretched before the fire as he had thrown himself in an attitude of utter exhaustion. The rambling cries, and the moaning of the man on the bed, kept her awake. She found herself listening to the tangled threads of his raving. The firelight leapt in long beams across the room. There was no fear but a strange awe in her heart.
CHAPTER V
In the morning the tall man's eyes followed Mary as she went about the work of her house.
As though he were dreaming, he watched her break dry branches and sticks for the fire across her knee. Then it occurred to him to offer to break them for her, and he fetched an armful of wood from the stack in the yard. He gazed as if it were strange and wonderful to see a woman washing dishes, sweeping, and cooking at her own hearth. He saw her leg-rope and bail the cow, lead the cow and calf to the fenced paddock on the top of the hill after the milking, and carry buckets of water from the creek to the house, the sunlight touching her bare head and flashing from the water in her pails.
Mary did everything in a serene, methodical way, going from one task to another as though she were happy in each, and in no hurry to be done with it. He heard her calling to the fowls as she threw a handful of crumbs to them; and, seeing that he was watching, she told him, smiling a little, that the matronly, buff hen. Mother Bunch, was a very good hen indeed, laying every day, except Sunday, in the summer and spring time; and that the smart, speckled-backed pullet was no good at all for laying.
"She gives us a little brown egg now and then," Mary said, "and makes such a fuss about it! That's why I call her Fanny. She is so like Miss Fanny at home who could not sew at all well, but when she made a dress that a woman could wear all the countryside knew about it. He"—she indicated the lordly rooster—"is called the Meester—that is the Master in English."
A smile showed in the man's sombre eyes.