But she turned the very next moment and crossed to the mirror on the wall––that square bit of glass before which Young Denny had stood and stared back into his own eyes and laughed. Oblivious to everything else she was critically scanning her own small reflection––great, tip-tilted eyes, violet in the shadow, and then cheeks and pointed chin––until, even in spite of her preoccupation, she became aware of the hungry tremulousness of the mouth of that reflected image––until the hoarse shriek of an engine’s whistle leaped across the valley and brought her up sharp, her breath going in one long, quavering gasp between wide lips.
It was that moment toward which she had been straining every hour of those two days; the one from which she had been shrinking every minute of those last two hours since dark. She hesitated a second, 300 head thrown to one side, listening; she darted into that dark front room and pressed her face to the cold pane, and again that warning note came shrilling across the quiet from the far side of town.
There in the darkness, a hand on either side of the frame holding her leaning weight, she stood and waited. Below her the house roofs lay like patches of jet against the moon-brightness. She stood and watched its whole length, and no darker figure crept into relief against its lighter streak of background. Minutes after she knew that he had had time to come, and more, she still clung there, staring wide-eyed, villageward.
It wasn’t a recollection of that half dismantled wreck of a house under the opposite ridge that finally drew her dry-lipped gaze from the road; she did not even think of it that moment. It was simply because she couldn’t watch any longer––not even for a minute or two––that her eyes finally fluttered that way. But when she did turn there was a bigger, darker blot there against the leaning picket fence––a big-shouldered figure that had moved slowly forward until it stood full in front of the sagging gate.
And even as she watched Denny Bolton swung around from a long contemplation of that half-torn-down building to peer up at his own dark place on the hill––to peer straight back into the eyes of the girl whom he could not even see.
She saw the bewilderment in that big body’s poise; even at that distance she sensed his dumb, numbed uncomprehension. From bare white throat to the mass of tumbled hair that clustered across her forehead the blood came storming up into her face; and with the coming of that which set the pulses pounding in her temples and brought an unaccountable ache to her throat, all the doubt which had squired her that day slipped away.
Before he had had time to turn back again she had flown on mad feet into the kitchen, swept the lamp from its bracket on the wall with heedless haste and raced back to that front window. And she placed it there behind a half-drawn shade––that old signal which they had agreed upon without one spoken word, years back.
Crouching in the semi-gloom behind the lamp she watched.
He stepped forward a pace and stopped; lifted one hand slowly, as though he did not believe what he saw. Bareheaded he waited an instant after that arm went back to his side. When he swung around and disappeared into the head of the path that led from the gate into the black shadow of the thicket in the valley’s pit she lifted both arms, too, and stood poised there a moment, slender and straight and vividly unwavering as the lamp-flame itself, before she wheeled and ran.