“I can’t go––I can’t!” she breathed. And then, lifting her head, vehemently, as if he could hear:
“I want to––oh, you know I want to! But I can’t come to you tonight––not until I’ve had a little longer––to think.”
Almost before she had finished speaking another voice answered, a soft, dreamy voice that came so abruptly in the quiet house that it made her wheel like a startled wild thing. She had forgotten him for the time––that little, stooped figure at its bench in the back room workshop. For hours she had not given him a thought, and he had made not so much as a motion to make her remember his presence. She could not even remember when his sing-song, unending monologue had ceased, but she realized then that he had been more silent that night than ever before.
Earlier in the evening when she had lighted his lamp for him and set out his lump of moist clay, and helped him to his place on the high stool, she had thought to notice some difference in him.
Usually John Anderson was possessed of one or two unvarying moods. Either he plunged contentedly into his task of reproducing the multitude of small white figures around the walls, or else he merely sat 158 and stared up at her hopelessly, vacantly, until she put the clay herself into his hands. Tonight it had been different, for when she had placed the damp mass between his limp fingers he had laid it aside again, raised astonishingly clear eyes to hers and shaken his head.
“After a little––after a little while,” he had said. “I––I want to think a little first.”
It had amazed her for a moment. At any other time it would have frightened her, but tonight as she stroked his bowed head, she told herself that it was nothing more than a new vagary of his anchorless mind.
But that same strangely clear, almost sane glow which had puzzled her then was still there when she turned. It was even brighter than before, and the slow words which had startled her, for all their dreamy softness, seemed very sane as well.
“You have to go,” John Anderson answered her faltering, half-audible whisper. “You have to go––but you’ll be back soon. Oh, so soon! And I’ll be safe till you come!”
Dryad flashed forward a step, both hands half-raised to her throat as he spoke, almost believing that the miracle for which she had ceased even to hope had come that night. And then she understood––she knew that the bent figure which had already turned back to its bench had only repeated 159 her words, parrotlike; she knew that he had only pieced together a recollection of the absence which her vigil before the window had meant on a former occasion and repeated her own words of that other night.