The table rocked dangerously as she crowded her body between it and the windowsill and, back to the light, stood staring with her face cupped in her hands out into the blackness. Far across the valley the dilapidated farmhouse on the ridge showed only a blurred blot against the skyline.
Minutes the girl stood and watched. The minutes lengthened interminably while the light for which she waited failed to show through the dark, until a dead white, living fear began to creep across her face––a fear that wiped the last trace of childishness from her tightened features.
“He’s late,” she whispered hoarsely. “It’s the last week, and it’s just kept him later than usual!”
But there was no assurance in the words that faltered from her lips. They were lifelessly dull, as though she were trying to convince herself of a thing she already knew she could not believe.
As long as she could she stood there at the window, doggedly fighting the rising terror that was bleaching her face; fighting the dread which was never quite asleep within her brain––the dread of that old stone demijohn standing in the corner of the 47 kitchen, which for all her broken pleading Young Denny Bolton had refused with a strange, unexplained stubbornness to remove––until that rising terror drove her away from the pane.
One wide-flung arm swept the stack of neatly folded patterns in a rustling storm to the floor as she pushed her way out from the narrow space between table edge and sill. The girl did not heed them or the lamp, that rocked drunkenly with the tottering table. She had forgotten everything––the thick white square of cardboard, even the stooped old man in the small back room––in the face of the overwhelming fear that reason could not fight down. Only the peculiarly absolute silence that came with the sudden cessation of his droning monotone checked the panic haste of her first rush. With one hand clutching the knob of the outer door she turned back.
John Anderson was sitting twisted about on his high stool, gazing after her in infantile, perplexed reproach, his long fingers clasped loosely about the almost finished figure over which he had been toiling. As the girl turned back toward him his eyes wandered down to it and he began to shake his head slowly, vacantly, hopelessly. A low moaning whimper stirred her lips; then the hand tight-clenched over the knob slackened. She ran swiftly across to him.
“What is it, dear?” Her voice broke, husky with 48 fright and pity. “Tell me––what is the matter? Won’t it come right tonight?”
With shaking hands she leaned over him, smoothing the shining hair. At the touch of her fingers he looked up, staring with pleading uncertainty into her quivering face before he shook his head.
“It––it don’t smile,” he complained querulously. His fingers groped lightly over the small face of clay. “I––I can’t make it smile––like the rest.”