He looked round, shaking a dubious head. "Of course there's nothing like a flagpole here—but me, and I'm not quite long enough. Perhaps I can find something to serve as well. We might nail a plank to the corner of the roof and a table-cloth to that, I suppose."
"And build fires, by night?"
He nodded. "Best suggestion yet. I'll do that very thing to-night—after I've had a bite to eat."
She started impatiently away. "Oh, come, come! What am I thinking of, to let you stand there, starving by inches?"
They entered the house by the back door, finding themselves in the kitchen—that mean and commonplace assembly-room of narrow and pinched lives. The immaculate cleanliness of decent, close poverty lay over it all like a blight. And despite the warmth of the air outside, within it was chill—bleak with an aura of discontent bred of the incessant struggle against crushing odds which went on within those walls from year's end to year's end....
Whitaker busied himself immediately with the stove. There was a full wood-box near by; and within a very few minutes he had a brisk fire going. The woman had disappeared in the direction of the barn. She returned in good time with half a dozen eggs. Foraging in the pantry and cupboards, she brought to light a quantity of supplies: a side of bacon, flour, potatoes, sugar, tea, small stores of edibles in tins.
"I'm hungry again, myself," she declared, attacking the problem of simple cookery with a will and a confident air that promised much.
The aroma of frying bacon, the steam of brewing tea, were all but intolerable to an empty stomach. Whitaker left the kitchen hurriedly and, in an endeavour to control himself, made a round of the other rooms. There were two others on the ground floor: a "parlour," a bedroom; in the upper story, four small bedchambers; above them an attic, gloomy and echoing. Nowhere did he discover anything to moderate the impression made by the kitchen: it was all impeccably neat, desperately bare.
Depressed, he turned toward the head of the stairs. Below a door whined on its hinges, and the woman called him, her voice ringing through the hallway with an effect of richness, deep-toned and bell-true, that somehow made him think of sunlight flinging an arm of gold athwart the dusk of a darkened room. He felt his being thrill responsive to it, as fine glass sings its answer to the note truly pitched. More than all this, he was staggered by something in the quality of that full-throated cry, something that smote his memory until it was quick and vibrant, like a harp swept by an old familiar hand.
"Hugh?" she called; and again: "Hugh! Where are you?"